Never Look Back
by Jedi Buttercup
Summary: WIP. Then Shall the Chosen make their Choices Four. B:tVS, A:tS AU, 4th novel in the Lesser Men series.
1. Prologue: Travers

**Title**: Never Look Back

**Author**: Jedi Buttercup

**Disclaimer**: All your Buffy are belong to Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy.

**Rating**: R

**Summary**: Then Shall the Chosen make their Choices Four. Can the Scooby and Fang Gangs integrate succesfully to meet the challenges that face them? Or will the trials ahead tear them apart?

**Spoilers**: Post B:tVS S6 and A:tS S3, which in this AU conform to canon through 6.17, "Normal Again" and 3.16, "Sleep Tight".

**Series**: There are three novellas and eight interludes prior to this story in my "Lesser Men" saga. See profile for a "map" of the saga.

**Notes**: This story has been a long time in the writing. Other Muses and RL have kept the author distracted, but as of April 2006 it is back in the priority queue.

* * *

**Prologue**

SATURDAY, JUNE 8, 2002, 8:04 AM  
COUNCIL HQ

--

Quentin Travers, sometime Field Watcher and current Head of Operations, frowned as his assistant knocked hesitantly at the door of his office. Travers had made it quite clear when he'd acquired the young man a year ago that he was not to be bothered on any working day before he'd finished his first cup of tea and perused the morning papers, and up until now that directive had been scrupulously obeyed. That Percy dared risk his displeasure before the tea had even been poured was suggestive of urgency and disaster, and given the operations currently underway, that did not bode well for the remainder of his day.

"Well, what is it?" he asked, his tone clipped and precise as he addressed the interruption. He pushed the open newspaper to one side, clearing an expanse of highly polished mahogany desktop directly in front of him, but neglected to refold the paper or remove his reading glasses. He was not a man who believed in unnecessary displays of emotion when a few well-placed props could hint at his displeasure and impatience just as effectively.

Percy sighed audibly and eased the door open, then took a few slow steps in the direction of the desk. He held a sheaf of papers before him like a shield, and the blank expression on his face owed as much to nervousness as any sort of professional behaviour. "Sorry to disturb you, sir, but there has been a development, well, a few developments, regarding the subject of our current operations. You had asked that the airports be monitored for any incoming persons from America at all associated with her, or her acquaintances from her time in Sunnydale, with especial focus on those involved in that unpleasantness with the law firm in Los Angeles a month ago..."

"And...?" Travers cut in, hoping to bring him closer to the point. Whatever blood ran in young Percy's veins, it was Travers' opinion that the boy was not true Watcher material, despite his mild gifts in the areas of research and administration. Travers had been tempted to post him to the Archives and request a new assistant on more than one occasion, but then, he had also thought the same of Wyndam-Price the younger before that young man's Calling to Sunnydale. They were _still_ dealing with the fallout of that misperception. It was always possible that there were more to Percy than met the eye, as well.

Percy stepped closer and proffered the papers with a slightly unsteady hand. Travers raised an eyebrow at the boy, then took them casually from his hand and glanced down, scanning the topmost page. His impatience fled, however, before an abrupt wash of unease as he recognized the face captured in a pair of digitized images, staring back up at him. It was clearly Ethan Rayne-- yet another fragment of the Council's dirty laundry come back to haunt them.

The images had apparently been taken in an airport, presumably one of the many in Britain whose camera feeds were regularly monitored by the Council, and the timestamps indicated that they were less than twelve hours old. The sorcerer had not aged particularly well-- few so deeply absorbed in the darker magics did-- but he possessed that same hungry, determined air about him that Travers remembered from their last, unpleasant meeting. What was more, he had clearly not returned to Britain alone. In both of the photographs, his eyes were directed off-camera, narrowed slightly as his attention was diverted by the person he was following.

"Damnation," Travers muttered. "Do we have any stills of the person he was tracking?"

Percy seemed mildly startled. "Ah, no, sir. The Head of Intelligence had the same concern when the images were recovered-- his department spent some hours on the question, but whoever it was, he or she managed to stay out of reach of the cameras. Mr. Rayne avoided the obvious ones, but the individual he seemed to be watching wasn't even picked up by the secondary system."

Travers' scowl deepened further. It went without saying that such stealth should not have been possible, at least without attracting the attention of the airport's security personnel with unnaturally evasive behavior. Every camera had its blind spots, but weaving such a path between them would have been extremely difficult, even with a working knowledge of the cameras' locations, and the cameras were _not_ blind to magical means of concealment. "The presence of Mr. Rayne on his own is questionable," he mused aloud, "but if he were accompanied... do we know the current whereabouts of Rupert Giles and the younger Wyndam-Price?"

Percy cleared his throat. "Ah, the page following, sir. The overage account, the one cards are issued from in the event of a Special Operations deployment in America..."

Travers set aside the page containing the photographs and turned his attention to the second sheet of paper. It appeared to be a photocopy of a credit card receipt from a store within the Los Angeles International Airport, detailing the purchase of a number of travel-related items, such as a piece of luggage, a suit of clothing, toiletries, and so forth. Slight shadings and faded lettering suggested that the original receipt had perhaps been retrieved from a trash receptacle after being carelessly crumpled and discarded by the shopper. "This purchase was made on one of the assocated cards?" he asked.

"Yes, sir," Percy confirmed. "Specifically, the one issued to Weatherby's team when they were sent to Los Angeles to apprehend the subject three years ago."

"Immediately after she awakened from her coma," Travers nodded, remembering the event. "Weatherby didn't mention the loss of the card. Has he been reported for disciplinary action?"

"That report is in with the others," Percy said, gesturing toward the remaining stack of papers on Travers' desk. Then he shifted a little, uneasily, and continued his narration. "The passenger logs on Mr. Rayne's flight and the ones immediately preceding it from the States were checked carefully, and there was no mention of a Wyndam-Price, Wyndam, Price, Giles, Wesley, Rupert, or any derivation of those names. There was, however, a businessman on the flight in question that answers to young Wyndam-Price's description. A security guard, a flight attendant, and a woman at the ticket counter all remembered the scar at his throat clearly, but unfortunately none of them have any recollection of the name he was using."

Travers sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "And the rest of these papers?" he asked wearily. It was clear from Percy's manner that that had not been the last of the unpleasant news.

Percy winced. "If you will recall, sir, you asked that I pass on several specific security protocols to the men in charge of restraining the subject..."

"And you failed to impress the seriousness of the issue on them," Travers surmised, and his lips thinned to a grim line. The rest of the paperwork would likely be injury and damage reports, in that case. Very few of the Special Operations men had been in contact with an actual Slayer, as opposed to a Potential Slayer, in recent years and had likely overestimated their own ability to deal with her. He was suddenly glad he hadn't had his tea yet; this called for something a bit stronger. "How many casualties?" he asked.

"Half a dozen wounded, sir," the boy reported, "but no fatalities. There was, however, considerable destruction of property before they were able to subdue her."

Travers looked away from the paperwork, past his irritant of an assistant, and met the marble gaze of the bust positioned just to the left of the door. The Founder of the London branch of the Council had been immortalized in that form hundreds of years before, and the rumor persisted that something of the man still lived on, observing his successors. Indeed, the stone figure seemed to have developed a distinct sneer and superior tilt of chin in recent months that it had not possessed before.

_I would like to see you do any better in these circumstances_, Travers thought at the figure, then shook his head. Damn these unpredictable Slayers and their maverick Watchers.

"Aspririn, Percy, and a secured line, if you please," he said aloud, rubbing at the bridge of his nose again. "I have a few calls to make."

"Yes, sir." The young man backed carefully out of the room, then eased the door quietly shut behind him.

Travers reached for the bottle of scotch he kept in the bottom drawer of his desk. It was shaping up to be a _very_ long day.

--


	2. The Cavalry Arrives: Dawn

**Chapter One: The Cavalry Arrives**

SATURDAY, JUNE 8, 2002, 9:35 AM (GMT)  
LONDON

--

Dawn blinked drowsily and covered her mouth to stifle another enormous yawn. "Aren't we _there_ already?" she asked, well aware that she was whining but not alert enough to care. They'd been on the move since Giles found Wesley missing at some ungodly hour yesterday, and all she really wanted to do at this point was find a bed and collapse. "What are we waiting for?"

Buffy sighed and leaned sideways in her chair to rub a strong hand over her sister's back. "We can't crash 'til we've got a room, Dawn," she said, then stifled a yawn of her own. "Giles is trying to find out what room Wes is in and book ours on the same floor. Only thing is, he didn't tell Cordy what name he's using, so..."

"Great." Dawn scowled. "So why didn't he? And why not just tell us which room to begin with? Why's he treating this like some kind of double-oh game? It's not like we would have told anyone else." She shifted in her seat again, then shot another half-hearted glare across the lobby at the back of Giles' head.

"Because he thinks we've got a spy, that's why," Anya said, matter-of-factly. Out of the nine travelers, she was the most rested; she'd refused to fly coach, insisting instead that she'd meet them when they arrived in London. True to her word, she had appeared without warning twenty minutes ago when they'd entered the hotel and was now sitting primly in a seat on the far side of a weary Xander.

"A spy?" Willow asked, sounding baffled. "How? I mean, it's not like there's all that many of us to infiltrate." She sketched a hand in the air, indicating their small group, and frowned at Anya. "And if he thinks one of us would take money from the Council, he's crazy. Well, I guess Giles does, but I mean, that's only because of Buffy."

Tara stirred against her girlfriend's shoulder, responding to the sound of distress in Willow's voice. She had fallen asleep in that half-sitting, half-leaning pose almost as soon as they'd sat down, but there were some things that could reach her even in the middle of a dream. She opened her eyes a little, breathing out a soft question. "Willow...?"

"Shhh, honey, it's okay. We're just talking, nothing's wrong." Willow threaded her fingers through Tara's golden-brown hair almost absently, her green eyes still fixed on the justice demon.

"I didn't say he thought one of _us_ was the spy," Anya said acerbically, crossing her arms in front of her with a frown. "Just that someone's been listening in. And I mean, it makes sense. You tell _me_ how many things have gone wrong since we started moving to L.A. That remodeling crew, the first one, that tried to cut out a retaining wall? Or the boxes of store stock that mysteriously went missing? How about the three buyers that suddenly dropped out? We _still_ haven't managed to sell Buffy's house."

Cordy groaned. "Oh, and that's the least of it. You guys have been in Sunnydale half the time, you haven't seen everything that happened to us. You know that paint we used for Lorne's club? Totally not my first choice. We had a custom batch specially made, just the perfect shade of moss green, and it bubbled up and slid off the walls six hours later. As if that wasn't enough, it turned into a mess of nasty little sludge demons and took up residence in the old swimming pool. It wasn't pretty."

Despite her exhaustion, Dawn couldn't help but smile at the familiar outrage in Cordy's voice. The former cheerleader may have been Sunnydale's Bitch Queen, but she'd been pretty cool to "mini Buffy" after she'd become part of the whole slaying gig. Dawn was sure half the stuff she said was just a smokescreen, as much as Xander's jokes were: misdirection.

"The new paint is also beautiful, Princess," Groo put in, smiling warmly at the Seer. "And sludge demon free. Please, do not fret."

"Anyway," Anya interrupted, throwing Groo an irritated look. "The point is that _something_ is going on. I don't blame Wesley for being suspicious."

"Well, there'll be time to figure that out when we get back to L.A.," Buffy said, firmly. "In the meantime, we have Faith to worry about."

Her hand stilled on Dawn's back, prompting the younger girl to look up and see what she was staring at: Giles. Their Watcher had turned away from the counter and was walking in their direction, a fistful of plastic rectangles clenched in one hand. Keycards, probably.

"Looks like G-Man's figured it out," Xander said, then stood up, stretching lazily. "Finally. I'm dying for a nap and a change of clothes."

Dawn followed his example, wrinkling her nose at him as she stood. "A nap? Then what do you call what happened on the plane? A fainting spell? I _heard_ you snoring."

He rolled his eyes at her, with a fond smile. "You can never have too many naps, Dawnster. Seriously, though, the easiest way to reset your timesense when you travel is not to crash until night, local-time. I'll just do the cat-nap thing, recharge my batteries, then see what Wes is up to."

"Sounds like a plan to me," Buffy put in, with a wan smile. "Slayers don't need that much rest anyway."

Older Slayers, maybe, Dawn thought with an irritated growl. She'd started breaking things accidentally a week and a half ago, right on schedule, but she hadn't noticed any major change in her sleeping patterns yet. Or in everyone else's attitudes; if she was suddenly a supernaturally enhanced warrior, wouldn't it make sense to lift her curfew? Ugh.

The others were all up and moving now as well, although Tara still didn't look entirely conscious. Bags were lifted, purses clutched, and they all shifted toward each other, forming a loose semi-circle facing towards the reservations counter. Giles had stopped to discuss something with a man halfway across the lobby, and from the expression on his face Dawn could tell it wasn't anything pleasant. He was wearing a variant of his Ripper look, and the air was starting to thicken around his shoulders and hands with little green sparks. That was never a good sign.

Before any of them could come to his rescue, though, the discussion was over as quickly as it had begun. Giles went white, then red, then spat something that made Dawn wish she could lip-read and stalked over toward the group with a lot more urgency. There was a brief flare of light behind him, and the other man suddenly shook his head with a confused expression and started walking slowly towards the doors of the hotel.

"Giles," Buffy greeted him, with a frown. "Talk to me. What was that all about?"

He frowned at her, then glanced around at the others, his gaze lingering on Dawn for a moment. He shook his head. "Nothing. It's nothing. Just, just a childhood friend. A, a Watcher. He's never forgiven me for taking up with Ethan, I'm afraid, and as it happens, Ethan was spotted in this hotel earlier in the evening. Jeremy was apparently under the impression we were up to old tricks, and I... disabused him of that notion."

There was more to it than that, even Dawn could tell that much, but it didn't look like he was going to say any more while she was there. God, sometimes being fifteen _really_ sucked. Even being a Slayer didn't help at all, not with an older sister who could _still_ beat her up and a Watcher who was more of a father to her than anything else.

"Ethan, hunh?" Xander grunted. "Is this a good thing, or a bad thing? 'Cause I'm thinking, the last thing we need on this trip is his idea of fun."

Tara shivered. "He sure seemed like an oogly-boogly when I met him."

The comment seemed to break Giles' mood up a little, and he gave the blonde witch a ghost of a smile. "I'm not certain. His being here seems a bit too coincidental, but whether he's currently jobbing for the Council or if he simply followed Wesley, I can't say. With our luck, he'll be on the same floor we're on, and we can bother him about it in the morning. Er, in the afternoon, I suppose."

"So what name _DID_ Wes use?" Cordy asked, stepping forward a little. She'd been a little miffed and a lot curious since the ex-Watcher's cryptic phone call. "I'm betting it's some variant of Connor, but I'm dying to know how he finished off the name."

"Connor MacLiam, actually," Giles said, with a nod. "All things considered, it's rather appropriate. A bit transparent, but I doubt the Council will recognize it yet; I doubt Quentin or Richard Wyndam-Price have made the tale of Wesley's origins common knowledge."

The dark-haired Seer lifted her chin, looking smug. "I knew it!"

Willow nodded slowly. "Connor, son of Liam, huh?" she said, looking thoughtful. "Guess he doesn't know what Angel's last name is, either."

Dawn shot her a startled look, then giggled. It came out as an undignified little squeak, which she quickly choked down, trying to look innocent; trust Willow to go off on a tangent.

Giles sighed. "And on that note, we had best adjourn upstairs. I've procured us four rooms. Cordelia, you and the Groosalug will have one to yourselves, as will Willow and Tara; Buffy and Dawn will share with Anya, and..."

"...our illustrious leader will nobly suffer the indignities of rooming with moi," Xander finished the sentence for him, looking amused. He took his door card with a smile as Giles handed them around, studiously ignoring the man's irritated expression.

"Quite," was Giles' only response.

Buffy frowned as she took her card, glancing over toward the center of the lobby where the man Giles had argued with used to be. "Aren't you at all worried about that Germy guy? If he belongs to the Council, and he knows you're here, that just totally blew our cover."

"Oh, he already took care of that," Anya said off-handedly, before Giles could answer. "Didn't you see the green flash? Nice Obliviate, by the way." The last comment was addressed to Giles directly.

Obliviate? Now where had Dawn heard that before? "So _you_ were the one borrowing my Harry Potter books," she accused, narrowing her eyes at Anya. "I wondered why they suddenly turned up with creases and smelly dust all over them."

"Children," Giles sighed, in his best put-upon librarian voice. "Yes, I took care of it, Anya; and no, it wasn't an Obliviate spell. Where that blasted woman gets her ideas..."

He trailed off, taking in the bored, exhaused expressions on everyone's faces. (Only Groo looked interested, and in Dawn's opinion, that just reinforced his basic weirdness). "Right. We're on the fourth floor; the lifts are this way."

"Fifth floor, you mean," Buffy groused, as she turned to follow him. "What's with the numbering system, anyway? And, lifts? Sounds like shoes gone wrong. Why not just say 'elevators'?"

"Because we're in England," Cordy answered, as if that would explain everything. "What, didn't you ever travel?"

Xander snorted. "You can take the girl out of high school..."

"You're one to talk," Cordy sniped back, but the corners of her mouth were twitching.

The good-natured bickering abruptly reminded Dawn of the people they'd left behind, who weren't quite suited to a daytime flight across the ocean. Spike would have been highly amused by the whole situation, and thrown in lots of little comments of his own. She missed him already-- and she thought he probably missed them too, or at least her and Buffy. She doubted he was having nearly as much fun in his current company.

"Do you really think it was a good idea to leave Spike alone with Angel?" she asked, directing the question at no one in particular as they filed into one of the lifts.

Xander snickered somewhere behind her, then went quiet as somebody elbowed him.

"They have to work together sometime," Anya said pragmatically. "Either that, or kill each other."

On that note, the lift doors closed, and they jolted into motion.

--


	3. Enemy Of My Enemy: Lilah

**Chapter Two: Enemy of My Enemy**

SATURDAY, JUNE 8, 2002, 3:13 AM (11:13 AM, GMT)  
LOS ANGELES

--

He appeared in her apartment without warning, while she was in the middle of counting her payoff for the third time. As it happened, five million pounds at an exchange rate of 1.48 or so had come out to seven million, four hundred thousand US dollars, all of which had been neatly packed in an overlarge briefcase for her tactile enjoyment. It was a drop in the bucket compared to the sums the firm had handled on a daily basis, but it seemed so much more impressive 'in person' than the cheque or direct deposit she'd been expecting-- and it was hers. All of it, hers. She was up to 'six million, five hundred ten thousand,' when a quiet "Ahem" broke into her thoughts.

"Sahjhan!" she exclaimed, blinking up at her visitor in shock. She'd almost forgotten he even existed, what with all the changes over the last several weeks. One day she'd been nodding and smiling, working his plots against Angel and his son into her own plans for the Souled Wonder's future misery; the next, it seemed, she had been staggering through a sewer with Wolfram & Hart disintegrating behind her. A lot of formerly important projects had seemed suddenly trivial, then.

"My, my," he said mildly, throwing a casual glance over the bundles of cash strewn on her bedspread. "We've done well for ourselves, haven't we?"

"_I_ have done well for myself," she replied, regaining some of her composure. Her chin lifted a little, and she met his gaze squarely, resisting the urge to stuff the money back in the briefcase. "Strange how there's been no word from your corner since Linwood sucked the firm into Hell."

"What, you expected me to turn in a daily report?" he said, shrugging her sarcasm negligently away. "There wasn't anything you needed to know. But since my last few tries at Connor haven't gone quite as I'd hoped..."

"You thought you'd come and beg my help, like you did when Holtz fell through." Her plastic lawyer's smile slipped a little, and she narrowed her eyes at him as she got to her feet. "What, did you hang around in some other dimension just waiting for me to be in a good mood? I'm not going to help you for free, you know, rich or not."

He chuckled. "Hang around? My dear, time means nothing to me. What use would I have for waiting? I flit here, I flit there, I appear whenever I choose." He gestured expansively with his hands and posture as he spoke, like an actor on a stage. "One day I'm watching Angel mooning over that little human baby of his, the next the baby's all grown up and I'm insulting him with poetry..."

She must have blinked, because his tone abruptly shaded with amusement, and his scarred face cracked in an ugly smile. "What, that surprises you? I've got a lot of years under my belt, you know. You think I never cracked a book? I could quote for you if you want; how about 'Le Belle Dame Sans Merci'?"

She shook off the impulse to match him insult for insult, and counted ten seconds in her head for patience. It wasn't the poetry issue that had surprised her - erudite Big Bads weren't exactly uncommon in her world. The reference to 'all grown up', however, was new, and piqued her considerable curiosity. She widened her eyes a little, disarmingly, and cast out another question. "Isn't Connor just a little young for classical poetry, even if he was in the right dimension to read it?"

"Ah, ah, ah," he said, shaking a finger in her direction. "You do something for me, I do something for you. I don't work for free either."

Ah, here it was; the bargaining portion of this little encounter. The last time they'd done business had been a lot simpler. He'd had the plan and the prophecies, she'd had the infant's blood and the grudge, and they had simply merged goals. What was Sahjhan up to now? And was it compatible with her current goals? If not, they might have a problem.

"Mmmmm." She crossed her arms, pursing her lips a little in a semblance of disinterested irritation. "So you intend to pay me for services rendered with what, information? What makes you think I'd want this information of yours?"

"_Trust_ me," he said, his voice warming with enthusiasm. "To some people, what I know is worth ten times what you were paid for kidnapping Faith. I'll even tell you part of it before you get started on my project, to prove it."

She frowned at the mention of Faith. Sahjhan could watch a lot of places at once, obviously, if he knew what the money was for; only Travers and a few of his friends on the Council had been involved. Rejecting this demon could be a risky proposition. What else might he know? And who would he _tell_, more importantly?

"And if I back out on you after that...?" she asked, slowly.

He shrugged, and his expression went serious and still. "You won't. We both know I can follow you anywhere and anywhen, and there's nothing to stop me from recruiting a few more minions. Ask Holtz. Oh wait, you can't; gee, I wonder why that is."

She winced at the sarcasm. "And if you back out on me, or feed me lies?" she prompted. "Seems like you have all the power, here."

"I guess you'll just have to trust me," he said, blinking innocently at her, and gave her another mild, ugly smile. "Really, what possible benefit could I get from double-crossing my primary contact in this time period?"

What, indeed. She nibbled a little at the inside of her lower lip, thinking hard. It was true, there were any number of supernatural groups who would pay handsomely for information about Angel's son, not to mention the fact that if he were an adult she might be able to bargain with him, as well-- surely, with Holtz to raise him, he couldn't be much of a White Hat? Besides, if worst came to worst, there was a Resikhian Urn sitting in her closet that she could try. She'd done her homework the first time, and knew they were supposed to trap his kind; it was sheer luck that she hadn't taken it into the offices before they were destroyed.

After a few moments, she came to a decision, and met the demon's mocking gaze once more. "Okay. Tell me what it is you want me to do, and if I think it's feasible, we've got a deal." She moved toward the dresser as she spoke, where a bottle of her favorite wine stood next to a half-filled glass, residue of her earlier celebration. She needed it to calm her nerves, now.

He smirked at her. "Good choice. Besides, I think you'll find the task kind of fun. Do you remember Angelus' grandchilde, Spike?"

She rolled her eyes and poured a bit more wine in the glass. "Of course I remember him. Bleached blond, obnoxious, lived with Drusilla for a hundred years? She had quite a bit to say about him, when we brought her to turn Darla, and some of it I could even understand. If it hadn't been for that chip of his, we would have considered him for our payroll, as well, but a killer who can't kill isn't very useful."

"So make him useful," Sahjhan suggested.

"What?" That wasn't what she'd been expecting, not even close. "You want me to take out Spike's chip?" Somehow, she'd thought he would want to cause harm to Angel, not to... Oh. She blinked, and for the first time since he'd shown up, her mouth curved upward in a genuine smile. "I think I see where you're going with this."

"Take it out, deactivate it, I don't care," he said, waving a hand dismissively. "Just take it permanently out of the picture, and let his nature take care of the rest."

She took a sip of the wine to cover her excitement as visions of potential mayhem danced in her mind. It was a matter of record that Spike had been helping the Slayer and her crew in Sunnydale, but he'd also sworn to bathe in their blood the moment the chip came out. And now that Angel's little gang had merged with Buffy's once more, the potential fallout was amazing. Angel would kill him in the end, of course, but in the meantime?

She nodded. "I'll have to get into the Initiative's sealed records and find a way to implement, which might take some time, but it sounds like a plan to me."

"Good." He rubbed his hands together, and took a step backward as if he were ready to depart. "So here's a snack to tide you over: Connor had a protective shield cast over him when Holtz took him through to Quar-Toth. That defeated to purpose of the exercise, so I sent him somewhere else, instead... or maybe I should say, somewhen?"

Without further ado, he disappeared, leaving Lilah blinking in confusion. Somewhen? He'd actually sent the baby back in time? The idea went spinning through her mind, rippling with possibilities, and she sank back to a seat on the bed, deep in thought.

Connor couldn't have already lived and died; Sahjhan might be able to travel to many wheres and whens, but whatever he was up to had to be in the _here and now_. She'd bet all her money on it. And given what she knew of the complex prophecies, Connor was virtually guaranteed to be living somewhere in Los Angeles, near his father. Was it possible that she'd already run across him somewhere?

Hell, he could be _anyone_. He could even be Spike. Would Sahjhan have tossed him back that far, to a time when Holtz would have been more comfortable? The idea appealed to her, and she turned it around in her mind a few minutes longer before setting it aside. It was impossible to be sure without more information, and there wasn't any Files and Records girl to ask questions of, anymore.

With a sigh, she set the empty wine glass down on the floor beside the bed and started gathering the bundles of money back into the briefcase. She'd better get this somewhere safe, and then...

Sahjhan had been right; she _was_ going to have fun.

--


	4. Out of the Frying Pan: Jonathan

**Chapter Three: Out of the Frying Pan**

SATURDAY, JUNE 8, 2002, 3:47 AM (11:47 AM, GMT)  
LAS VEGAS

--

They stopped the car a few miles outside of Vegas, at a gas station still in sight of the glow of the strip but far enough out that they were sure no one was chasing them. Jonathan, as the only one in the bunch still presentable in public, was tasked to go into the convenience store and buy a few essentials-- ice, Ziploc baggies, a few snacks, and a box of Band-aids. He paused over the limited spice shelf on his way to the register, remembering a box of garlic powder in another convenience store a month ago, then sighed and shook his head. He'd yet to make a road trip that didn't either begin or end in some kind of adventure. Sometimes both.

Fred took the ice from him as he got back into the car, and transferred some of it into several of the Ziploc baggies. Gunn hissed in pain as she applied one to his bruised cheek and handed him a second one for his damaged knuckles, then gave her a weak, grateful smile. "Thanks, girl. Don't know what I'd do without you."

Lorne, ensconced in the front passenger seat with a fedora to hide his horns and unusual skin tone, chuckled a little and looked back between the seats at the two of them. "I don't know what I'd have done without _all_ of you," he said, animatedly. "It's a good thing the three of you were there with me; he wasn't going to let me go without serious persuasion."

Jonathan started the car and put it in gear, then eased out of the gas station parking lot and back onto the highway. "Hey, that's what we're here for," he said, giving Lorne a brief smile. "You said you needed someone to take care of the baggage on this little trip, right?"

"Baggage." Gunn snorted. "Right. Yeah, and 'persuasion' is what I do best. What did he want you for, anyway? I thought we were just here to touch base with your contacts and buy some stuff for your club that you couldn't get in L.A. What's this DeMarco guy to do with that? I thought he ran the shows at the Tropicana, and we didn't go near there the whole week we were in town."

Lorne sighed. "Oh, he did. Does. It's complicated. I heard about him awhile back, when he was still just a second rate lounge magician; that's pretty common in Vegas, you know, with all the free-floating magic in the air. Rumor around town is that he got his hands on something legitimately mystical several months back, and then he suddenly started moving up the food chain. Until today, though, I had no idea what he was up to."

"And?" Fred prompted. "I mean, it was easy to tell there was something wrong with the people in that casino, to me at least, but they weren't drunk or drugged or sick or anything. Just apathetic, kind of blank."

"Destinies," Lorne said, sounding disgusted. "Stealing destinies. He was running a big scamola with that million dollar prize wheel, capturing people's future blessings on those little chips and sucking them in. The thing's enchanted, of course, with the old black magic so it's rigged to never win. The only problem is, until recently he didn't have a way to separate the really valuable destinies from the rest-- wealth, power, fame, yadda yadda. He found out I could give him that."

"Ouch," Jonathan said with a wince. "That would have sucked. Helping that guy to hijack people's destinies, when all the time he was messing with yours, too."

"I don't really get it, though," Fred said, with a frown. "How do you borrow somebody's destiny? I mean, say you were going to be a gazillionaire because you invented some part that ended up revolutionizing space flight. Only you don't, because he stole your destiny. So what happens next? Does he sell it to some guy who just so happens to have the same talent and knowledge to invent the part? Or could he sell it to anyone and have it still happen? Or does the part just not get invented?"

Lorne frowned, deep in thought. "The first one, I think. DeMarco wouldn't do it if he couldn't make money from it, but Newton's Laws apply to magic as much as everything else; it would be a lot easier to propel a guy already near the goal to a better destiny than a guy who was, say, frying doughnuts at a greasy spoon and never even finished his high school education."

"That's a pretty specialized kind of theft," Jonathan scowled. "Sounds like a buyer's market to me. Makes sense he'd want a way to pick out the kind of destinies people are asking for, not to mention avoiding people who are going to go bankrupt or break their necks skiing."

"Well, he won't be doing it any more," Gunn said, then moved the ice bag from his knuckles so he could lift a hand to cover his yawn. "Speaking of avoiding people, did anybody call Cordy in the last couple days? Her number showed up on the missed calls on my cell phone this morning, but things have been pretty messy ever since."

Fred shifted on the seat next to him, trying to adjust the microscopic outfit she was wearing for better comfort. DeMarco's men hadn't had Lorne for more than a few hours, but they'd had time to lock him up backstage at the Tropicana and Fred had been forced to go undercover as a dancing girl to find out what room he was in. "I didn't," she answered, distractedly. "I think I left my phone with my suitcase, and since we had to leave without going back to the hotel..."

"Ain't nothin' there we can't replace, Fred," Gunn assured her. "We already had the merchandise and the weapons in the car, and they was chasing us, so... well, we'll be home pretty soon."

She sighed. "I just wish I had something nicer to wear. This is pretty embarrassing, and it binds in some pretty bad places."

Jonathan glanced up at the rearview mirror, taking in the unhappy frown on her face. "TMI. But you know, I put my duffle out here because of the magic supplies in it, and I think there might be some clothes in the bottom. I don't know about nicer, but they'd at least come closer to fitting than anything these guys might have."

She blinked, and then a relieved smile began turning up the corners of her mouth. "Really? That would be wonderful. Thank you, Jonathan."

"No prob. Next time we stop, I'll get it out of the trunk for you." Sometimes, he thought, being a short guy actually had its uses. Chalk up another one for Jon-o on the Life vs. Jonathan scoreboard; his side was getting higher every day. At this rate, he actually might break even in 2010 or so.

"I don't suppose you had your phone in that bag, too?" Lorne asked hopefully, breaking into his musings. "I don't think any of us have more than two quarters to rub together right now, and it costs more than that to dial Los Angeles from a payphone."

"Actually, I put it in the glove box for emergencies," he said, shrugging. He was still baffled that they'd given him one to start with; it wasn't like he did more than hang out, shift boxes, and cast the odd minor spell. That wasn't much compared to most of the others on the team. "Anybody that called me would call you guys first, so..."

Lorne gave him a thoughtful look, then opened the glove box and started digging through the papers, gum wrappers, and other detritus stuffed inside. "I don't know about that," he said. "I've never even heard of half the spells you use; you're pretty specialized in your own way. What was the one you used to get into my room, by the bye? And why did it only work for you and Gunn? Fred was camouflaged, but I kind of stand out, you know. It would have made getting out a lot easier."

"Oh, just a _tempus fugit_ kind of thing," Jonathan said, shrugging. "Makes time go faster, in a really limited area. I couldn't expand it to cover more than the two of us without burning myself out or attracting notice, and it only really works when no one is paying attention. If they saw a blur and freeze-framed the cameras, they'd still find us."

"Wow," Fred put in, her voice suddenly alive with excitement. "Hey, you're getting pretty good at time manipulation. Can I borrow you sometime next week, after we've finished moving everybody in? I've got some physics theories that are really hard to test unless you can alter time to see the effects better."

"Oh, you're in for it now," Gunn groaned, sounding amused. "You'll never get rid of her once she gets started."

"Charles!" Fred objected, laughing, and pretended to slap him upside the head. Jonathan grinned at the image in the rearview mirror, glad that the tensions of the last twenty-four hours were over and done with. They needed this little break, between Vegas and the Hyperion, to unwind before they had to help all the Sunnydale people unload. The moving van was supposed to arrive sometime this afternoon, and it would probably take several hours to empty it.

"Aha!" Lorne pulled his arm out of the glove box, the cell phone clutched firmly in his green-skinned hand. "Okay, guys, quiet. Princess is going to be upset enough as it is, I don't need you distracting me."

Gunn sighed. "Oh, gimme that. She doesn't scare me." He reached forward between the seats, and Lorne gladly dropped the phone into his hand.

"Suit yourself."

Gunn started to dial the number for Buffy's house in Sunnydale, then glanced at his watch and frowned. "Damn. It's pretty late, isn't it? What was the number at that hotel she's sleeping at?"

"555-2739, same area code," Fred told him. "It was pretty easy to remember; the last four digits spell CRDY."

"Cosmic irony, you think, or did she pick that hotel room on purpose?" Gunn asked, rhetorically, as he finished dialing. "Okay, ringing through."

There apparently wasn't any answer; after several seconds of waiting Gunn sighed and killed the call. "Guess they're out. Hope she didn't leave her cell behind." He dialed again, but once more, there was no answer.

"Buffy's house again, I guess," he finally said, and tried the number he'd originally meant to dial. "Didn't want to wake 'em all up, but maybe they stopped there after patrol?"

"Probably," Jonathan commented. "When we were stalking them, there were lots of times Buffy was up and around at this hour."

Silence filled the car again from Gunn's corner, and Jonathan frowned. No answer at any of the three phones probably meant something big was up, and that wasn't a good thing. He glanced down at the speedometer, then pressed his foot down a little more firmly on the gas pedal. There wasn't much traffic at this hour and they could take highways for most of the distance; no point in being leisurely about it.

"Oh, hey, Angel," Gunn suddenly said. It sounded like someone had answered, after all. "We've been out of contact for the last couple days, and I know we missed at least one call from Cordy. Mind filling us in?"

He was pretty quiet for several minutes after that, punctuating the buzz of Angel's conversation with a few Uh-huh's and No-shit's and "This is bad, man." When Angel's monologue finally came to a halt, he heaved a deep sigh, and asked a question.

"So, is it bad enough that we need to find an airport, or should we come out there and help you guys? I know we got a limited rental on that truck."

Jonathan glanced over at Lorne and then in the rearview mirror, meeting Fred's puzzled gaze. Yep, something big was up. He frowned and let the speedometer creep up another few mph, hoping there weren't any cops in the area. The last thing they needed was to get pulled over looking like this, but major trouble back home took priority.

"'Kay," Gunn continued, replying to whatever Angel's answer was. "I don't like it, them being all the way out there without us, but if we hurry it up we can probably still fly out sometime Sunday. No way they can rush the Council before then, right? Besides, I don't like the idea of you alone with the chipped wonder, either."

There was another brief pause while Angel said something. Jonathan wished briefly for the enhanced hearing the vampires had, or Wes, or Xander; this was frustrating. One more thing for him to research in his magic books, or to pick Ethan's brain about if he ever came back.

"Yeah, see ya in a few, man." Gunn turned the phone off, and sat still for a minute, staring at the back of Jonathan's head. From what Jonathan could see in the mirror, he looked pretty disturbed about something. Which only made sense; 'Council', 'over there', and 'fly out' added up to a trip to England, rescue-style. In no universe did that translate to a good thing.

"Charles?" Fred finally prompted, hesitantly.

He sighed, and shifted on the seat, turning to look at her. "Well, looks like we're going to Sunnydale. Faith's kidnapped, Wes went after her, and the whole Sunnydale gang upped stakes and followed, except for Angel and Spike..."

Good grief, Jonathan thought, as Gunn continued his explanation. So much for sleep anytime soon; who ever said 'no rest for the wicked' had it all backwards.

--


	5. Into Temptation: Spike

**Chapter Four: Into Temptation**

SATURDAY, JUNE 8, 2002, 4:42 AM (12:42 PM, GMT)  
SUNNYDALE

--

The world was livening up a bit, creeping toward the hour when all vampires with an ounce of sense should be indoors, or underground. Spike could feel the sun's approach like a tingle just under his skin as he crept through one of Sunnydale's many graveyards; he'd come out looking for some rough and tumble to soothe the agitation running hot in his blood, but as the minutes advanced his chances of finding any were dropping sharply. Any minions rising this late would probably go up like a match to touch paper even without his help, and he'd be lucky to get back to Revello Drive without being singed himself.

He gave a snort of disgust and wandered back toward the cemetery gates, glancing idly out at quiet houses full of people whose fates he wouldn't have cared about a year ago. Two years ago, and he'd have been actively plotting against them; three, and he'd have been feeding from them, running amok with his mad, lovely Dru.

It wasn't that he didn't still feel the urge to rend, tear, and drain these frail humans to the last drop; of course he did. He was still a demon, after all, and he didn't have a soul like the great Brooding Wonder did to drown out the darker impulses. What he _did_ have was a chip-bought space of his own to think in without the Powers that Be or their opposite number yanking his chain about. If he'd chosen to stick with the Summers girls and follow their do-gooding cause, then it was _his_ choice and no one else's. No matter what that nancy boy said.

Spike sighed and thrust a hand into the pocket of his duster, rummaging for his packet of fags. He had time to smoke one more before running back if he took the sewers for the last little bit, and he was determined to stay out of the house as long as he could. If he'd had any idea how peevish the elder vampire could get when his little family was scattered to the four winds, he'd have insisted the Slayers truss him up and toss him in a trunk with a couple of blood bags. Only the fact that Spike worried, too-- about the Nibblet, anyway, as she still hadn't quite sorted her gifts out yet-- kept him from ending their latest argument with fists and fangs. Instead, he'd come out here, in a futile attempt to burn the anger off.

Sod Angel, anyway. What did he know? The great git had never even considered sticking with the White Hats when his soul came out the last time; because of that, because _he'd_ done a complete about-face, he seemed determined to believe that Spike had to have an evil motive for staying on the Slayer's team. Especially after all Spike had been through.

For Spike's part, as far as he was concerned, Angelus was a sadistic, moody bastard, and the only difference between that version of Angel and the souled one was that 2.0 had a pesky conscience. What difference, then, would a soul make to Spike? Nothing but a decade or two of useless, guilty tears.

He checked the horizon line again, decided he'd stayed out long enough, and dropped the cigarette butt into the dirt. Enough introspection for one night; if he were lucky, Angel would already be asleep, and Spike could work out the rest of his irritation shifting what was left in the house into the living room. They could finish it up tonight, pack everything in and drive it down before Sunday sunup; as long as the crew in Vegas came up for air and got their arses back to L.A. in time to unpack, they should still be able to make the deadline and get the truck returned by Monday. Spike would personally rather have paid the fines and left Angel to finish on his own, but if it would give Buffy peace of mind to have the task done... then he'd get it done.

He eased his way through the cemetery gates and turned onto the sidewalk, ambling in the direction of Buffy's house. There were a couple of early morning joggers down the road, trusting in the faint glow on the eastern horizon to keep the bogeymen away, and one strange bloke in shapeless brown robes standing at the end of the block that set off his danger sense.

Spike stopped in his tracks, tilting his head a little to the side as he gave the man a once-over, head to toe. His first thought had been 'Monk!', an image still capable of punching his buttons more than a year after Dawn's near-demise, but a second look turned up a hideously scarred demonic face, and his supernaturally enhanced senses didn't pick up any scent or sounds of movement. Either Ugly had been frozen in that pose long since and Spike was just unlucky enough to have found him, or this was that incorporeal timephasing wanker that had stolen Angel's kid and sent him to the past.

"Sahjhan," he announced, narrowing his eyes at the stranger.

"William the Bloody," the figure spoke, finally showing signs of life, and sketched him a mocking little bow. "I'm pleased to see that reports of your intelligence were not exaggerated."

Spike raised an eyebrow at Sahjhan and abruptly started walking again, paying no further attention the demon's presence save for the sidestep required to keep from running into him as he walked.

"Or do you prefer Spike?" Sahjhan continued, sounding dryly amused this time.

"What I'd prefer," Spike said to no one in particular, "is to get home before catch fire and become a pile of dust." He kept walking as he spoke, duster trailing behind him like half-furled wings as he picked up the pace of his steps.

There were only two reasons he could think of for this demon to be here, talking him. Either Sahjhan wanted to gloat about what he'd planned for Angel, expecting Spike to play along, or he wanted to use Spike against the older vampire, the way he'd tried to use Wes. Spike didn't have enough patience for the first option-- he was sure to lose his temper before he got any useful information-- and the second promised the usual payoff of pain or death. Neither option was very tempting.

"Ah," Sahjhan said, from behind him. "I understand. Sunrise, vampires, not a good mix. I think I'll just tag along and talk as we go." The demon's voice sounded just as close as it had when Spike had first passed him by; obviously, he hadn't taken the hint.

Spike stopped short and turned to face him. "Look, I don't know what you want, but whatever it is, I'm not interested. Piss off."

"Are you sure?" Sahjhan said, eyes widened incredulously. "That's strange, because I'd heard you _wanted_ your chip out."

If Spike's blood hadn't already been cooled to air-temperature, that remark would have chilled it. Twinned threads of hope and fear sprang up, twisting through his thoughts, and he struggled to keep his reaction neutral. "That's been tried, mate, and failed," he told the demon, his lip curled into a sneer. "Unless you've got the original schematics, which went up with the Initiative ..."

Sahjhan just chuckled. "It might surprise you to know it's still there," he replied. "Oh, no, not populated, but the order to destroy the place... mysteriously... got lost." He took a step to the side, then another, forcing Spike to turn in order to keep facing the demon.

"I could probably just have it turned off," Sahjhan continued, conversationally, as his path became a circle around the vampire. "Or I could have the pain turned up, keep you from getting within six feet of a human ever again. Or, maybe," he paused dramatically, "I could see about reprogramming to stimulate the pleasure centers instead. A little spike of joy every time you hurt someone, or take a life; just _imagine_ what that would be like."

Spike didn't need to imagine; that was more or less the effect the vampire demon had on the human mind. To have it augmented...

Sahjhan's amused expression shifted to a thoroughly self-satisfied smile, and he stopped circling, leaving Spike facing East again. Abruptly, Spike realized that he'd shifted into 'game face' without noticing; the world around him had taken on a slight reddish tinge, and his jeans were fitting tighter than they ought. The promise of being uncaged after two and a half years of forced restrictions had excited him, and aroused him, more than he would have expected. Call him unnatural, but he'd got used to his 'cage', and even come to think of it as one of the more serendipitous changes in his long existence; he had a goal now, and a future unspooling in front of him that appealed to all sides of his nature. This sudden sea-change of emotion very definitely disturbed him; it wasn't natural, however good it felt.

Dawn, he thought, letting her name echo in his mind. Buffy, Wes, Watcher, Red, Tinkerbell, Demon Girl, Harris. He kept going, reciting the names of their little clan in his thoughts as a sort of calming mantra, and after a moment, it began to work. There were _reasons_ why they wouldn't make tasty snacks, reasons that the instinctive response of his demon to whatever-this-was had obliterated with bloodlust.

"All right," he growled, "you can take off whatever it is you're using to try and convince me, and just tell me what you're here for, right quick like. I want to get underground before sun-up." He let the 'game face' melt away, watching Sahjhan intently as he did so.

"You have a very strong mind for one of such a capricious species," Sahjhan said quietly, suddenly very, very serious.

"I was a Master once, you know," Spike replied, just as quietly. "And I had Dru. She was better at it than you are."

"Ah, Dru. Do you want her back?"

Wheels within wheels, bait upon bait. It looked like option one was in play, after all, patience or no. "Right, then. You're offering me everything I've dreamed of for the last three years, so I assume you have something you want of me in return. Out with it, then." He thrust his hands into the pockets of his duster, squaring his stance and dropping his chin just a little in the malignant, determined posture his minions had always known better than to cross.

Sahjhan nodded slowly. "What I want from you is very simple; when the chip fails-- and you'll know when it does-- I want you to save Angel for last. That's it. I don't care what you do to the others, in what order, or even if you save any of them for toys or minions. Just do what you do best-- destroy things. Disrupt their lives. Create chaos. In short..." He grinned cheerfully. "Enjoy your freedom."

Enjoy his freedom? Would he really be free, or would he fall into yet another cage imposed on him by outside forces? Spike narrowed his eyes a little more. "It'll be permanently off?" he clarified.

"Yes," the demon assured him. "And don't worry about your Dru. I'll let her know you're a bad dog again." He chuckled. "Really, for a vampire, she's a most remarkable conversationalist."

"Done, then," Spike growled. "Now get out of my sight."

Sahjhan just smiled, then gave a nod of respect before taking a step backward into nothing. Returning to his own dimension, probably, or another one close by where he could watch what was going on... and where he could have seen Spike and Angel argue, and decide it was a good time to stick his nose in. At least the tosser didn't seem to have an ear in-- if he'd actually heard the argument, he'd have never tried this tack.

So how long would Sahjhan stay around if Spike was now his favored project, he wondered. How much would Spike have to act along to keep him from interfering again? Whatever happened, he didn't like the idea of someone holding the controls for his chip.

Nevermind. He shook his head, irritably, and strode swiftly toward the nearest sewer entrance. The first order of business was to get his own arse out of danger; next, watched or not, he had to let someone know what had happened. Someone who wouldn't stake him, ram a fireball down his throat, bar their doors, or otherwise announce to all and sundry that the chip was being turned off. Who also might have an idea or two on how to salvage this situation, keep him from following Sahjhan's intentions will-he, nil-he.

Who might have some idea how bloody _tempting_ all this was -- and how determined he was to keep his arse firmly on the fence anyway.

And, of course, was also incommunicado, on another continent.

"Bugger."

--


	6. All Fall Down: Faith

**Chapter Five: All Fall Down**

SATURDAY, JUNE 8, 2002, 1:19 PM (GMT)  
LOCATION UNKNOWN

--

"Hello, Faith."

She knew that voice-- knew it pretty well, actually, though it usually rang a lot louder in her ears. B's little sis had been through a lot for her age, but fifteen was still fifteen and the girl could squeal and shriek with the best of them. Quiet and serious from Little D meant something was very, very wrong, and the elder Slayer felt a pang of alarm as she turned to get a better look at her.

The first thing she noticed was Dawn's face-- thin and paler than she'd seen it last, framed by that shiny mane of brown hair. She was wearing a long black duster that looked suspiciously like Spike's over a sparkly blue top out of Buffy's wardrobe and a pair of snug black jeans. There were two stakes tucked in a loop at her belt, a sword naked in her hand, and a crossbow slung across her back; she was poised in a ready stance, and there was no innocence left in her steady blue gaze. She looked scarily like Buffy standing there, despite her different coloring, and Faith knew instinctively that this was the Dawn that _could be_, not the Dawn that was.

And that meant Faith was Dreaming. Shit.

"Hey, D," she said warily, unsure how she was supposed to respond. "So, uh, what's going on?"

Dawn didn't answer immediately, just watching her with wary eyes, and Faith took the opportunity to glance around a little. The scenery wasn't very inviting; in fact, there mostly wasn't any. The glossy black surface that they stood on had no edges or interruptions that Faith could see, and the night sky arched above them like a starry bowl turned upside-down. It reminded her a little of the Great Plains at night, actually. She'd crossed that vast sea of open earth at some point on her trek from Boston to Sunnydale and found it too exposed, too vast for her to really appreciate. It made her feel tiny and insignificant, and she'd never liked that feeling.

Besides which, the last time she'd talked with someone in a Dream she'd been in a coma, trying to tell Buffy how to stop Mayor Wilkins. What a fucked up trip that had been, too. Every time she opened her mouth, riddles came out; then, after B exited the Dream and went back to the real world, Faith had dreamt of nothing but B trying to kill her over and over again for the next eight months. Yeah, Faith got that her subconscious mind was punishing her for betraying the man who had treated her like a daughter... her therapist in prison had been kinda fond of repeating the obvious. Still. Not a pleasant precedent. It kind of colored her expectations, now.

Fucking PTB. She would have got the message just as easy if they'd set the Dream in the Hyperion, or their apartment. Used a face that _wasn't_ in the Hellmouth prophecy. Even just showed her what she needed to see, like an ordinary Dream-vision, without this pointless conversation. Linda, her first Watcher, had always said Slayer Dreams were a neutral thing; they were meant to share information and warnings, not to punish or manipulate or whatever. Yeah, right. Wes would be getting an earful about this when she woke up.

The Dawn-figure finally came to some conclusion. She nodded at Faith, and her intense gaze softened a little as she spoke. "Little Miss Muffet, curds and whey... It sat down beside her, and yet she stayed."

The words didn't make much sense, but they sounded familiar, and the old scar on her stomach twinged unexpectedly when she racked her memory for details. Coming on the heels of her earlier thoughts on Slayer Dreams, it raised her hackles something fierce. She frowned at the younger girl and shrugged her shoulders a little, then indulged herself in sarcasm.

"Sorry, D. I don't do this cryptic shit. Can you be a little more specific?"

Once again, Dawn didn't answer, not directly. Instead, she gestured at herself with her free hand, slowly repeating a line from the damned prophecy. "Then shall the Chosen make their choices four," she said, as if that would explain everything. Then she looked away from Faith off into the vastness at her right, and pointed that way with the sword she held.

Faith followed the other girl's gaze, and flinched at what she saw. A stone crypt had suddenly appeared in the middle of nowhere, its grey bulk improbably welcome in this forbidding place. The scene taking place against it was less so. Buffy slumped there, pinned up against the near wall by a vampire with bleached hair; her eyes were wide and frightened, and her lips kept shaping the word 'no' as she pushed at the leather-clad shoulders above her. It wasn't any use. The vampire lunged for her, biting deep into her throat, and the light slowly faded from her eyes.

"Fuck!" Faith strained to move, to run over and stop it from happening, but her muscles refused to obey. She couldn't even turn her head to glare at Dawn, or to look away-- but even as the thought formed in her mind, the scene before her shifted and changed.

It was replaced by an equally disturbing vision of Wesley, chained hand and foot to a nondescript wall. Concrete, no windows; it could have been any basement, anywhere. But it wasn't. She knew before the image of Travers formed in the flickering shadows next to him that it had to be Council property.

'Should they ever find out what I've become...' Wes had said one night, when they'd compared their darkest fears. He'd never finished that sentence in her hearing, and remembering what the Council was capable of where _she_ was concerned, she hadn't asked him to. 'I know,' she'd told him, and they'd left it at that. Maybe they shouldn't have. They could have planned, or ran, or _something_. Anything but what she was seeing.

The Travers-figure sneered something at the bound Wes, who glared back, eyes sparking with anger. Faith saw the flash of gold in their depths, and the way his muscles strained against the metal links; they had to've drugged him, or the chains would never have held against his new strength. There was a reason the prophets called him Destroyer, after all. Did Travers know that? She shuddered, watching them, and kept straining to move... but she was still frozen, helpless to intervene when Travers suddenly pulled a stake from his pocket and drove it into Wes with all his might.

He didn't dust. But he bled. And his eyes, like Buffy's, slowly dimmed and then went flat.

"NO!" she screamed, at the top of her lungs. It wasn't the only thing she'd screamed, either; her throat was raw and her ears were ringing, but she couldn't remember one thing she'd said since the first strangled "Fuck" had left her lips. The two people who'd just died before her eyes knew her better than anyone else on the planet, except for Angel; sister Slayer, Watcher-turned-lover. The last month had seen bridges rebuilt, friendship reknitted, and lust kindling into something more. She would _not_ believe it would all end this way, in violence and blood. Not so soon.

The wall faded from view, and the chains, with their prisoner. And Travers. Faith went silent again as they vanished, and felt angry tears pooling in her eyes. She wouldn't let them fall, though, not in front of some face-stealing avatar of the fucking Powers that Be. During the pause between that scene and the next one that had to be coming, she took a few deep breaths to calm herself.

The blackness lifted to reveal Faith herself, sprawled atop the coverlet of a massive four-poster bed. She was wearing black leather pants, high-heeled boots, and a clinging maroon top; normal Slayage-wear. A perfect copy of the clothes she was actually wearing, as a matter of fact. Faith glanced down at herself in dismay, then up at the matching figure on the bed, and realized with a dizzying sense of shock that that was her, _at that very moment_, and that behind those dark lashes the Dream she watched from was playing out.

I was captured, she remembered, suddenly. Lilah set a trap with herself as bait, and Faith had sprung the fucking thing. Sold her to the Council, drugged to the gills, put her life in the hands of...

Sure enough, there he was, sitting in a heavy, ornate chair that materialized next to the bed. She'd recognize him anywhere; he was one Watcher she'd give her eyeteeth to have at knifepoint. Wes' dad. Or, at least, the man he'd _called_ Father for too many years. He cradled a finely crafted pewter goblet in his hands, and he watched the sleeping Faith with a frightening intensity. Waiting for her to wake?

This was so far from five-by-five, it wasn't even funny.

Dawn chose that moment to interrupt her train of thought, walking into Faith's line of sight with a determined air. She extended her sword again, pointing directly at the goblet Mr. Wyndam-Price held, and made one last announcement.

"Ashes, ashes, we all fall down," she said, with a stern frown. "You must choose... wisely."

Instantly, Faith's mind flashed to an aged knight, standing watch over the Holy Grail, and Harrison Ford's character urgently searching through shelves full of cups. She didn't think that was what the Dawn-being meant, but even so, it was a disturbing comparison. Indy at least had his dad's diary to help him with the choices he had to make; Faith had nothing.

"How am I supposed to choose?" she demanded. "How am I supposed to know what choice you're talking about?"

Dawn shook her head and gestured at the goblet a second time, then gave her a sad smile. The scene faded away as the others had before it, taking Dawn with it this time. Faith was left with only the endless starscape for scenery, and even that started to fade after a few seconds.

"It has begun," a quiet voice whispered. And Faith woke up.

* * *

Faith stifled the urge to groan, suddenly aware of a throbbing pain in her temples and a heaviness in her limbs. She sucked in a slow breath, then flinched as the movement awakened all the bruises from her _first_ awakening in Council company. After so many centuries of Cruciamentums, they ought to have known that even a drugged Slayer was never helpless, but she'd done a surprising amount of damage before they'd found a needle and put her back down.

A faint squeak of chair legs and the brush of fabric over skin alerted her that she wasn't alone, and the last vision from her Dream came rushing back. Bed, Watcher, goblet-- a choice. From what she could sense with her eyes shut, it had been pretty accurate. Unfortunately.

So, did that mean the other visions had come true? Doubt and fear snagged momentarily at her gut, sending chills through her, but she pushed them away as quickly as she could. She had to believe everyone else was still OK, at least until this was over; she couldn't afford to get caught in an emotional undertow. Besides, why would the PTB put the visions and the whole 'choice' thing in the same Dream if they weren't connected to each other? Choose wisely, and they live; choose poorly, and... "ashes, ashes," Dawn had said.

Hmmm. Maybe the Indiana Jones thing wasn't such a bad analogy after all. (Xander would get a kick out of that, if-- when!-- she saw him again).

Well; time for the villain to speak. She didn't have the patience to wait him out, so it looked like it was her move. Slowly, she blinked her eyes open, and focused on the figure beside the bed.

"Hello, Faith." The man spoke quietly, his voice low and infected with malice. His fingers tightened on the stem of the pewter goblet, and his lip twitched in a sneer.

Whatever else was going on with this guy, it was obvious he hated her, quite thoroughly. The similarity to the Dawn-thing's words wasn't lost on her, either. She let her lips curve in an ironic smile as she answered him.

"Hey, Rich. Got your grubby hands on me at last, huh? You know, kidnapping your son's lover probably isn't the best way to patch things up."

"Kidnapping? No," he said, and made an ominous noise that might in some other universe be called a chuckle. "I'm merely offering you a choice. Kidnapping involves a lack of consent, and your fate is entirely up to you."

A choice? Already? What the fuck? Talk about your last minute warnings.

Faith narrowed her eyes at him, and let her glance stray to the cup in his hands. "You think I'd consent to anything you could tempt me with? Even you aren't that stupid, Rich."

Surely this couldn't be the choice the PTB were referring to. They were _never_ this obvious. Never. So what the hell was going on?

"Did I say anything about temptation?" He rose smoothly out of the chair, the better to dominate the room with his presence, and took a step toward the bed. "For such a simple choice, that's hardly necessary."

From her new perspective, Faith thought, he really _did_ look intimidating, even in tweed. Something about the conviction in his voice, and the glint of enjoyment in his eyes... He was getting off on this, and there wasn't much she could do about it until her strength came back. He was too smart to get caught the way the others had, and there was something about the way he held that goblet...

"So what's behind Door #1?" she asked, defiantly.

He raised an eyebrow at the sarcastic tone of her voice, but held his ground. "You live. Under my control, as the good little Slayer you should always have been."

Flashes of early Wesley danced in her thoughts, and he'd only been parodying the source. Wyndam-Price senior, as her Watcher? That would happen when Hell froze over. She'd sooner... Oh. Of course. "And Door #2?"

He gestured with the goblet. "You drink from this cup, and we'll have a new Slayer under our control. Young, sheltered, impressionable... They're so eager to please at that age."

The words were calculated to provoke, and he oozed smugness like rank oil. Anger burned bright in her thoughts-- fuck that, she'd take Door #1 and break free as soon as she could!-- then fizzled and left her feeling remarkably hollow. If Door #1 were the answer, then why the fuck send her that Dream? Because that's what she would have chosen, anyway. Was there something _else_? What was she supposed to do?

Just what were the Powers asking of her?

She cleared her throat and diverted the subject. "You're so sure the next Slayer would be yours? What if she's another one like me or Buffy?"

He chuckled again. "And what do you imagine we've been doing while you were in jail? We devised a more certain method of locating Potential Slayers, and gathered them all within our walls. Forty-seven young women, all of whom now know better than to defy us."

She stared at him, aghast. Forty-seven? Shit. Her throat tightened, and her next question came out a lot weaker than intended. "And Door #3?"

"There isn't one," he announced. "Don't worry; I'm not going to pressure you for a decision. I'll come back in a few hours, and then... well, we'll see, won't we?" He flashed his teeth in a predatory grin, then set the goblet on an elegantly carved table next to the bed.

"Fuck you," she hissed, thoughts racing as she tried to come up with an alternative.

"No, thank you," he answered, and strode unhurriedly out of the room. "I have a bit more taste than my son."

The door closed behind him, and she heard a key turning in the lock. The sound it made was remarkably like the sound the goblet had made when he set it on the table; ominous and final.

"We all fall down," she whispered, staring at the demonic figures molded in the goblet's outer surface. Fuck. It looked like she had a decision to make.

--


	7. Sticks and Stones: Wesley

**Chapter Six: Sticks and Stones**

SATURDAY, JUNE 8, 2002, 1:37 PM (GMT)  
OXFORDSHIRE

--

Wesley slowed for the left turn off the A34 toward Little Compton, grateful for the relative dearth of travelers on the roads. The Council research centre he meant to visit was located beneath a popular megalithic site, its existence thoroughly camouflaged by the heavy tourist trade, but by the same token access to the place was difficult to safely arrange. The fewer witnesses to his presence, the less difficult it would be to gain entrance to the lab complex below.

The small lay-by where visitors to the site were instructed to park was just a few hundred meters further down the road. There were a few cars already present, but he recognized one of them; it belonged to a member of the Rollright Trust, a subsidiary of the Council that managed the site. The number of actual tourists, therefore, was likely to be quite low. Good; this would be less difficult than he had feared.

The keys were heavy and warm in his hand as he pulled them from the ignition, and he sat there for a moment, studying the silvery flash of metal in the midday sunshine. It set off a chain of images in his memory-- the quicksilver of her presence in the link when they'd searched for Buffy, the silver of a belt buckle against the black leather of her pants, the silver of the chi-rho necklace he had given her against the pale skin of her throat-- and he winced, closing his fingers around them. There wasn't time yet for emotion, not until after he had succeeded. He took a deep breath, focusing on rebuilding his control, then got out of the car.

He dropped the keys into a pocket, then retrieved a small digital camera to support his masquerade as a tourist. Cyril was unlikely to report him-- he was here on the man's advice, after all-- but one could not be too careful, and there might be other Council employees about. The dark glasses he wore helped, as well; with luck, no one would give him a second glance, and he would not have to resort to magic.

It wasn't a far walk to the circle of stones commonly known as the 'King's Men'. It was easy to tell that they had been here for millennia; they were heavily weathered, worn down, and riddled with holes like rotten wood. They were accessible, human in scale, unlike the larger features of Avebury or Stonehenge. Like the larger sites, however, they carried a set of legends all their own.

For example, Wesley mused, it was commonly held that the stones could not be counted. Scholars had settled on 77, but it was consensus, not fact; it was rare that two observers ever came to the same number. Legend also held that these had once been actual men, and that, with the King Stone across the road and the Whispering Knights' dolmen to the southeast, they had fallen victim to a witch's trick and been solidified in place.

Both legends, in some part, were true; it was a matter of definition. Where did one stone end and the next begin? Did 'men' apply to demonic beings? The verses that supposedly told the tale were largely inventions of a later culture, but the story had been based in fact. The protectress of the area had stood against an invading army, and raised her voice to their leader in challenge.

"Seven long strides shalt thou take,  
If Long Compton thou canst see  
King of England thou shalt be."

The demon had found the promise irresistible. The town now known as Long Compton was just over the hilltop, and he believed he could not fail:

"Stick, stock, stone,  
As King of England I shall be known."

Naturally, he had not succeeded. The witch had called to the Earth for defense, and it had lifted to block his view. Then she had struck, attacking the demons with all her might. Unfortunately, without backup, the effort of fossilizing them all had taken more power than she could spend and survive:

"As Long Compton thou canst not see,  
King of England thou shalt not be,  
Rise up stick and stand still stone,  
For King of England thou shalt be none.  
Thou and thy men hoar stones shall be  
And myself an eldern tree."

The Earth had simply claimed her, giving rise to additional legends about her tree's sap and its effects. These legends, however, were false, as were as the tales of the faerie caverns under the circle and the stones' habit of leaving their places at certain hours of the night. These were entirely the Watchers' creation, serving as a distraction from what really went on after dark.

A burst of laughter sounded from Wesley's left, lifting him suddenly from his musings. Distraction, indeed. He'd been using history to block out the world again; an old defense, and an effective one, but not particularly appropriate today. He sighed, snapped a few belated photographs, then drifted across the grassy space to the far edge of the formation. There was only one tourist left, a man with a dowsing rod non-descript enough that Wesley's eyes had trouble settling on him; whoever he was, he was probably checking the circle for ley lines.

Enough. Wesley edged behind the largest of the stones, out of the man's view, and knelt to trace a symbol against the earth at its base. A faint ward-field tingled against his fingertips, lock to they key he quickly drew, then subsided as he stood. The next part of the procedure involved a slow, careful amble away from the circle and across the road, where he approached the fenced-in King Stone. The legends said this was where the faeries left their caverns; yet another level of defense. Any observers would think they were seeing things.

Ordinarily, the visit would be approved beforehand and the gate left unlocked. This visit was not ordinary, of course, but then neither was he, these days. He gathered his muscles, thinking wryly of all the acrobatics he'd seen Angel do, and leaped straight up and over the fence. A second key was required here, drawn directly on the surface of the rock; then, with only a soft 'click' as warning, the earth opened beneath his feet and he slid straight to the caverns below.

It wasn't a far drop to the floor; in fact, judging by the sharp lines of incipient bruising on his back, there seemed to have been stairs. He'd just been standing in the wrong place to use them. With a wince, he got back to his feet, shaking the pebbles and dirt from his jacket, and stepped forward to meet his welcoming party. Cyril looked thin and nervous as always, even more bookish than Wesley had ever been, with a weak little chin and dark, nervous eyes.

"Price," he said, with a sigh of relief. "I didn't think you'd make it."

"Cyril," Wesley replied, slightly disturbed by the man's tone of voice. "Where's Faith? You _did_ say she was here?"

The other man shuffled his feet and dropped his head a little. "Not exactly, you see..."

"Not exactly?" Wesley's voice rose sharply, and he had to squelch the urge to throw the researcher up against the wall. He knew the man meant well, but 'meant well' usually ranked at the level of a belly-flop in an Olympic diving competition. This did not bode well.

Something in his voice must have communicated his mood, because Cyril took a quick step backward and raised his hands in supplication. "Look, it's not that I don't know where she is, it's just that..."

"Just that... what?" a new voice mocked.

The voice was coming from just behind Wesley's position; the roaring in his ears must have drowned out the man's approach. Cyril flinched and paled even further, but Wesley was turning before the words had even registered, reaching with one hand to encircle the intruder's throat. At times, he quite thoroughly frightened himself, but there were occasions when supernaturally swift reflexes were useful. Very useful.

"Rayne," he hissed, as the man's identity sank in.

To his credit, Ethan didn't so much as twitch a muscle. He swallowed once, looking lean and mischievous even half-strangled and covered in dust, and curved his lips in a defiantly smug smile. "You didn't recognize me, did you?" he said hoarsely, then dropped a stick-like object to the floor.

Wesley looked down, loosening his grip, and recognized the object as a dowsing rod. "Bloody hell," he groaned. Ethan had been the ley-finder in the circle; he must have been using some variant of a notice-me-not spell, and Wesley had been too distracted to recognize the effects. "How long have you been following me?" he demanded.

"Long enough," Ethan said, and tugged at the hem of his obnoxiously green shirt. A few pebbles clattered to the floor, and he curled his lip at them in disgust. "I've been having the same dreams you have, after all. At least, the ones involving a certain Slayer in various stages of messy death, and I seem to have developed a sense of responsibility."

Wesley shuddered and took a step back. "Angels and ministers of grace defend us," he said, not sure how far to trust him. On the one hand, he was here ... and Wesley was well aware that his 'death' might have summoned another Watcher. The third presence in his connection to Faith had confirmed it, several weeks ago at Wolfram & Hart when they had tapped into the Slayers' link to find Buffy. On the other hand, he could not quite find it in him to believe that the Powers would permit _Ethan Rayne_ to play guardian to one of their Champions. Chaos-worshipping, casually immoral Ethan Rayne? The man who had indirectly caused Wesley's death in the first place?

"Do I come in such a questionable shape?" Ethan teased, and it took Wesley a moment to place the comment as vaguely Shakespearian, a response to his Hamlet quote.

"You even have to ask?" he replied sarcastically, scowling in irritation.

"I hate to interrupt, but _I_ have a question," Cyril said, sounding even more nervous. "Who is he, and what's he doing here?"

Wesley had almost forgotten the younger man was there. "Ethan Rayne," he said, rolling his eyes in Cyril's direction. "He's apparently here to help, but I suggest you keep an eye on him; I don't trust him as far as you can throw him."

"Wouldn't that be as far as _you_ can..." Cyril began to ask, momentarily distracted, then took in the muscular shape of Wesley's arms, a definite change from the scholar's build he'd had three years ago. "Nevermind. It's just that I wasn't expecting to cover for two of you; it's risky enough to just take one, and if I leave one of you here sooner or later someone's going to notice the door opened when it wasn't scheduled to..."

"Oh, don't put yourself out on my account," Ethan said, smirking, then began to chant something under his breath.

Wesley rolled his eyes, briefly reminded of Jonathan. "Be sure you haven't forgotten the counterspell," he said warily, and reached out to grab Ethan's arm as the sorcerer faded out of sight. The world took on the familiar dimness of a scene viewed through a dirty window, and Cyril gaped in their direction with something akin to shock.

"Oh dear," the man said, wincing. "You're not supposed to do magic in here! Now I'll have to think of something to explain _that_ as well when they check the activity logs!"

"Just get on with it," Wesley growled, trying to ignore Ethan's chuckling. "I need to find Faith, now. Every second we waste is a second of torture, or death, that I might spare her."

Cyril sobered up instantly, as Wesley had intended. "I didn't want to say anything over the phone, but I ran across some information yesterday regarding a restricted Council base in a different part of the country. One that doesn't show up on any of our maps. I can't exactly bring the data to you; it's encoded in a language I don't understand, and I was hacking a rather sensitive mail account at the time. I don't dare print anything where the system administrator might catch me."

"I don't exactly have the time to sit and translate anything," Wesley warned. "The longer I'm here, over and beyond the danger to Faith, the more chance one of the other personnel will trip over us."

Cyril touched a keypad on the left wall, tapping a specific numeric code, and with a loud 'thunk' the stairs to the King Stone closed themselves off. "That's all right, I have a few screenshots, and I can burn them to a CD. I just needed you here in person to retrieve them. I don't dare send it through the mail, or even by courier. Travers has a good third of the Council in his pocket, now; do you know, he intends to kill her, then chain-resuscitate each of the Potentials? All forty-seven of them are in Council custody."

"Chain..." Wesley's voice trailed away as he followed Cyril down the hall, still gripping Ethan's arm. The idea sickened him-- Travers would actually kill each of these girls, even temporarily, in order to create an army of Slayers? Would that even work any more, with he and Dawn now among the Chosen? Would the Powers That Be even permit it? Was there a prophecy he'd overlooked?

"Bugger that," Ethan growled. "Even Travers should know that sowing Death will only bring destruction. Will the man never learn?"

"You're one to talk," Wesley couldn't help but reply. Ah, the influence of California teenagers; at least he was swifter with a retort now, if a bit less erudite than before.

"I'm an avatar of Chaos, not Death," Ethan replied, his expression suddenly quite serious. "There is a difference, you know."

Wesley sighed. Ethan's words had the air of an oft-repeated argument, and there wasn't time to deal with it now. "I suggest we complete the mission and worry about the details later. We need to have a serious discussion, but I'd prefer to do it back at the hotel."

Ethan nodded, then shot a glance in his direction and summoned up another mischievous smirk. "Lead on, MacDuff," he misquoted, and began to pick up the pace.

--

**Author's Note**:_ Information about the Rollright Stones, directions to them, legends about them, and ownership of them were obtained from various websites, such as the Megalithic Portal. Any factual errors are probably due to misinformation from these sources, as I have never personally been there. (All references to Watcher involvement are, of course, of my own construction)._

--


	8. Waiting Game: Buffy

**Chapter Seven: Waiting Game**

SATURDAY, JUNE 8, 2002, 1:53 PM (GMT)  
LONDON

--

Buffy drew spirals on the plate with her fork, idly redistributing leaves of lettuce and cherry tomatoes. The clock on the wall said it was nearly two and the angle of the sun also hinted 'afternoon', but her stomach still insisted it was only six a.m. and she hadn't been out Slaying in a couple of days. Her body liked to binge when she'd been burning energy, but since Wes had disappeared everything had been hurry-up-and-wait. The thought of a full meal made her faintly nauseous.

Speaking of waiting, she mused to herself, where the hell was everyone, anyway? The only one she'd seen since leaving her room an hour ago was Xander, and he didn't count; she'd seen the faint lavender tint in the brown of his eyes, and knew he'd taken the Orbs out of storage. Through trial and error (and an awkward patrol that had left them trapped underground together for several hours) they'd discovered he needed much less sleep when 'invulnerable'. It was just like him to use an artifact of Power just to avoid a few hours of Z's; of course, if Dawn figured it out, she was going to kick his ass for that 'nap' speech earlier.

Hmmm. Now that would be fun to watch.

"Whatcha thinkin' about, Buff?" the object of her idle thoughts asked, dropping carefully into the chair across from her. He was _much_ more careful with furniture now that he could break it with hardly a thought.

She sighed and dropped her fork onto the plate with a clatter, then propped her chin up in one hand and looked across the table at him. "Just that I'm really bored," she said. "Did you get a hold of Wesley?"

"Nope," he said, with a careless shrug. "I must have called his room a dozen times. Ethan's, too; Giles told me what his usual aliases were, and sure enough, he's registered under one of them. Anyway, neither of them is answering."

"Figures. We come all this way, and we're stuck doing nothing? We could have got a full night's sleep and _then_ caught a plane." Dawn was the current master of pouting and sulking in the Summers household, but she had, after all, learned it _somewhere_. Buffy didn't get much time to practice it these days, but she felt somewhat justified indulging now. Besides, it gave Xander the perfect chance to do what he did best: cheering her up.

"Aw, come on, Buff." He widened his eyes and gave her an encouraging smile. "You can't tell me you weren't dying to know what they serve on Red-Eye flights. And 'Dracula 2000'? You _know_ you didn't get enough chances to mock that movie when it first came out."

"Don't fuck with an antiques dealer," she quoted sternly, then let a smile tug at the corners of her mouth. "You know, we ought to get Giles to say that next time he patrols with us. He used to have antiques in his shop, right?"

"If not, I'm sure he did when he worked at the museum," Xander answered, bending his attention to the remnants of his own lunch. Club sandwich, 'chips'-- what did Brits call potato chips anyway, if 'chips' was what they called French fries?-- and a milk shake; he was a bottomless pit when it came to food, no matter what time it was.

"You want my salad?" she asked him, pushing her plate away with her thumbs. "I'm not really hungry; it's still morning to me."

"You sure?" He dipped a 'chip' in the little catsup bowl, then popped it whole into his mouth. "You haven't eaten much since yesterday morning."

"Slayer metabolism, I'm fine." She scowled at him. "And don't talk with your mouth full, it's kinda gross."

"Ma'am, yes ma'am," he mocked, with a half-salute and a mischievous grin. "So, does that mean your grocery bill's gonna go up, or down? Now that Dawn's all Slay-gal, I mean."

"Oh, God, I don't know." She covered her face with her hands, trying not to slip into _those_ worries again. "From what Faith says, every Slayer's different, although I don't know how seriously I should take her comparisons with Wes. It's not like he got his powers the normal way."

"'Course not," Xander said, cheerily. "Since when did any of us ever do things the normal way? I mean, look at us. Two Slayers, a justice demon, two Wiccas, an Elemental mage, a part-demon Seer, a demon Champion, and then me. An 'empowered human', I think Giles said." With each person named, he ticked off another finger, until nine of them were raised, all but one thumb. "And all of us but Groo were 'normal' humans at some point during our lives. Pretty cool, huh?"

She laughed, and lowered her hands, crossing her arms on the surface of the table. "Somehow, I doubt you were ever normal, Xand."

"Yeah, well." He shrugged. "I think it was the clown that did it. I mean, clowns are just evil, you know? It traumatized my growing psyche at a vulnerable point in my childhood." His voice got more theatrical as he went, and he pressed a hand to his heart for good measure.

"It certainly did nothing for your sense of humor."

Buffy and Xander both looked up and found Giles looming above them, looking grumpier than usual.

"Hey, G-Man," Xander greeted him. "You look surprisingly un-rested. What's the what?"

The older man sank into the empty chair at Buffy's left. "I had another dream about Faith. I rather suspect I'm only getting the echoes of what Wesley's seeing, and none of it's pleasant. How are you faring, Buffy?" He turned his face to her with the question, and she could see the dark circles under his eyes.

She shook her head. "Not good, Giles. Lots of darkness and dread. I get the feeling that whoever's stalking her means to kill me, too, but I'm not getting any clear images."

"And hey, that's what I'm here for, right?" Xander joked. "I'm like Death repellent when it comes to Slayers."

"Xander," Giles growled, the lines on his face deepening into a frown.

Buffy shot her friend a look-- Enough, can't you see he's stressed?-- then laid a hand on her Watcher's arm. "It's okay, Giles. We'll get to her in time. But we gotta find Wesley first. He's not in the hotel, and neither is Ethan."

"I hadn't expected them to be," he replied, with a sigh. "It is midday, after all. Once Willow and Tara awaken we can try a location spell..."

"I thought you said we could do that mystic Slayer thingie," she objected. 'Once they awaken' meant more time waiting, and every minute they waited was a moment they weren't rescuing. The idea of Faith in Council hands made her skin crawl whenever she thought about it, and the idea of Wes on the loose and possibly captured, too, made it worse. They'd been careful to keep the truth of what had happened to him from being public knowledge; if the Council found out, there'd be hell to pay. And he'd be the one to suffer for it.

"That 'mystic Slayer thingie', as you so charmingly put it," Giles admonished her, "requires the presence of Dawn, and I rather doubt she'll be up before they are. When you... came back, the magics identified you and Dawn as one and the same-- you count as one Slayer, mystically speaking, and I can't make it work when you're apart. In fact, that's part of the reason we had so much trouble last year. Did you think I'd begun training both of you at once simply for the sake of convenience?"

"Calm down, Giles, and have some coffee. You're not much fun before caffeine in the morning." Xander waved at one of the wait staff, then snagged Buffy's plate and took her up on the offer of the salad. He speared three cherry tomatoes on his fork, then pulled them off one by one with his teeth and ate them with an exaggerated display of enjoyment.

Giles sighed, aggrieved, and Buffy couldn't help but smile at both of them. They might be sitting in a hotel restaurant in London, but they made it feel surprisingly like home for her. "So, can I call up to their rooms, then?"

"In another hour or so," Giles answered, with an apologetic glance. "I understand your impatience, but they need time to rest if we're to expect much from them." He blinked then, green-hazel eyes puzzled behind the glasses he still wore when he couldn't be bothered to put in contacts, and glanced at the empty fourth chair. "Incidentally, why isn't Anya here? I wouldn't have thought she'd need more sleep."

"Justice call," Buffy informed him, then paused to smile at the woman who came to take Giles' order and refill their water glasses. "Mmmm, thirsty." She took a long sip when the woman left, then set the glass down, tracing a finger around the rim. "She said it wouldn't take her too long. Something about a teenager who got scorned the morning after-- it was like eight on the east coast when she left. Um, an hour ago? Something like that."

Xander made a face. "I really wish she would stop doing that. I know she hasn't killed or maimed in like forever, not since she went back to being a demon, but sooner or later she's gonna get stuck. That boss of hers, D'Hoffryn? Not a nice guy, from what she says, and I can't imagine she's making him happy."

"She's a big girl," Buffy said. "And you know she'd kick you if she heard you say that."

"Yeah, yeah, I know. Nobody appreciates me anymore." He faked a pout of his own, giving the remnants of the salad the full brunt of his puppy-dog look.

"Of course not!" A fourth voice joined their little group, and Buffy looked up to find Cordelia Chase in full Society Woman mode, dressed as richly as she could afford these days and armored with make-up and a light floral perfume. "It's your job to appreciate _us_, didn't you know?" She flashed perfectly white teeth in a quick smile, then sank into the empty chair.

"Morning, Cordelia," Buffy greeted the other girl. "It looks like England agrees with you. Where's your better half?"

Cordelia rolled her eyes. "Still in the bathroom. I swear, he's nearly as vain as Angel sometimes; he's having trouble with his hair today. Where's everybody else?"

"Abed or abroad," Giles informed her, warming his hands around his coffee mug. "We'll give them another hour, then call everyone down and perform a locator spell. If all goes well, we should be able to reach Faith sometime this evening; I rather doubt they have taken her more than a few hours from the city."

"I hope you're right," Cordy said. "Wes was-- you didn't hear him. He sounded _calm_ on the phone, like nothing could touch him, and he always gets reckless when he's like that."

"Sounds like someone else we know." Buffy glanced at Giles, remembering times when Giles had acted that way. Was it a Watcher thing, or just something that happened when the alternatives were so bad that you stopped caring what happened to you? She'd been pretty crazy herself a couple of times. That last moment with Glory came to mind, for example.

"I think all of us are like that, sometimes," Xander spoke up, looking remarkably introspective. "That night when Jack O'Toole..." He trailed off, then shook his head dismissively. "Given the choice of being reckless or letting myself get scared into paralysis, I think I'd pick the danger pretty much every time."

Cordy snorted. "Like that's news. I'm surprised I don't get more visions on _your_ behalf, the way you rush into trouble. It's a good thing you got those Impervious things, although I wouldn't be surprised to find that there was something weird about you already. You've always healed up pretty fast from all those Slayage catastrophes."

Buffy glanced up at the clock again, losing track of the others' conversation. 2:17 and 30 seconds, 2:17 and 35 seconds, 2:17 and 40 seconds... "Has it been an hour yet?" she sighed, slipping back into Bored-Buffy mode.

"I'm afraid..." Giles began to reply, then trailed off into silence. As his voice failed, a heavy chill settled in Buffy's veins. "Oh, dear Lord..."

"I hate when he says that," Xander muttered, in the sudden quiet.

Whatever it was that was weighing her down, Giles obviously felt it, and it was _bad_. To Buffy, it felt like half her body had suddenly gone numb, a subliminal awareness of _other_ suddenly vanished without warning. Something had happened to Wesley or Faith, then, or maybe both. "Forget the hour, I'm calling now," she said around the sudden lump in her throat, and pushed her chair back. "We are _not_ going to be too late."

"And what if we already are?" Cordelia asked, eyeing her and Giles with a worried expression.

"Not gonna happen," Buffy repeated, firmly. "There's a Prophecy, remember? And we're gonna _all_ gonna fulfill it."

"I hope you're right," Giles said, then repeated himself in a quieter voice. "I hope you're right."

--


	9. Magic Word: Ethan

**Chapter Eight: Magic Word**

SATURDAY, JUNE 8, 2002, 2:02 PM (GMT)  
OXFORDSHIRE

--

It occurred to Ethan, roughly thirty paces from the stairwell, that the complex they had entered was unlike any Council property he had ever seen. Between his early familial contacts, his antics with young Ripper, and his attempts to woo his old friend back after the debacle of Randall's death, he had visited more than a few of the Watchers' outposts. They invariably stank of nobility, money, and power, accessorized with antique furniture, thick burgundy carpeting, and vast libraries full of artifacts and ancient tomes. This place, by contrast, was less 'Imperial pedigree' and more 'industrial laboratory'. The difference was disquieting, to say the least.

"It wouldn't surprise me to learn that Travers has been in contact with the Americans," he muttered, frowning as sense memory brought back echoes of the years he'd spent in captivity.

Wesley's grip tightened briefly on his arm in a wordless rebuke for disturbing the silence, then abruptly slackened. He shot Ethan a sideways, questioning look, then removed his dark glasses with his free hand and scanned their surroundings more thoroughly. The walls were white and smooth-- or would have been, without the visual interference of the invisibility spell-- and devoid of decoration; the tile underfoot was smooth and polished, trailing echoes of their footsteps behind them. There were discreetly placed cameras everywhere, and the open doors they passed exposed offices and labs full of humming equipment.

"The Initiative?" he inquired, an unexpected flash of sympathy in his eyes.

Ethan shook his head, dismissing the younger man's concern with a grim little smile. He hadn't lived over twenty years as a Chaos Mage without being a survivor; the last thing he needed was a dose of the White Hat concern for broken things. "Never mind. Have you been here before?" he asked, redirecting the whispered conversation.

Wesley blinked at him, blue eyes open and vulnerable without the shield of his glasses to obscure them. "No, although I know my fath-" He swallowed, then began again, careful to keep his voice down. "Richard Wyndam-Price came here often. He made frequent mention of the depth and breadth of the research they undertook here, discoveries they made that took decades to filter out to the Council at large, but he never discussed them in detail. When Cyril and I completed our training and word came that he was to be sent here, I thought he would make a more reliable contact--"

"So he isn't actually a chum of yours?" Ethan shot another look at the mousy little man scurrying ahead of them, and the uneasiness his felt in this place eased upward another notch. Interesting, that Wesley had been thinking of strategy even at his most useless... but not particularly applicable to the matter at hand. Perhaps it was just the setting putting him on edge, but his instincts had yet to fail him in matters of survival, and they were telling him that something was very wrong.

Wesley frowned. "He was a friend, yes, although not a close one. Why do you ask? He has never given me any reason to mistrust him."

Unlike you, he didn't say, but Ethan knew the sentiment was there. He glanced up at the ceiling again, letting his gaze linger on the dark eye of the camera placed at the next juncture of hallways. "How do you think he planned to sneak you in here, before I intervened?" he asked.

"A disguise, perhaps? Or he may have diverted the camera feeds." Wesley's tone was dismissive, but his eyes followed Ethan's to the camera, and the grip on Ethan's arm tightened.

Ethan winced. He forgot, at times, the changes Wesley had undergone in the past month; apparently, there were times when Wesley forgot, as well. There would be bruises down to the bone by the time they left this place. "He said 'risky for one'," he continued, "but no matter what disguise he intended to use, the cameras would have caught you. You know they'll have a Watcher on the feed if a significant project is underway. If he's afraid of the system administrator discovering a _print job_..."

"Then he can't have adjusted the cameras." The frown marring Wesley's features tightened momentarily into a scowl, then melted into a frighteningly blank intensity. "Very well. If he meant for me to walk into a trap, then by all means, let us not disappoint him."

"Us?" Ethan objected. If the younger man was going to play martyr, he did _not_ want to be involved in it. His personal concept of responsibility might stretch farther than it used to, but that was a bit more than he was prepared to give. "You'd better be bloody sure that we'll make it out again; I didn't follow you here just to end up in a cell again."

"No, you came to help Faith, didn't you?" Wesley murmured, a trace of sarcasm in his tone. "I'm still not quite sure I believe that... but don't get your knickers in a twist. I doubt anything the Council could plan would be able to hold me, anymore. They have no idea what I'm capable of."

Ethan blinked, feeling the echoes of history pressing on him again, this time from a different era. "You sound very much like Ripper did, once upon a time. And he was back in the fold within the year."

"You'll just have to trust me," Wesley said blandly, and then closed the conversation with a dismissive frown.

An uneasy silence accompanied them down a few more mazelike passages, until Cyril came to a halt before a door labeled with a plaque that read "419". There was a passcard reader on the wall next to the door knob, and he swiped a small rectangle of plastic through it while Ethan stared at the plaque in amusement. Someone had scribbled a series of foreign characters beneath it, and despite the obvious signs of a thorough scrubbing and repainting, the message was still clearly legible.

"Does that honestly say..." Wesley whispered, his attention also caught by the graffiti.

Cyril was close enough to hear them, now, and threw an irritated look back over his shoulder at the space of air they occupied. "Bloody Americans. Travers had several of them over for a collaborative project several months ago, and they were a bit fond of practical jokes. They used some sort of magically durable ink, and I haven't found a way to negate it yet."

"They wouldn't have been from the Initiative, would they?" Ethan asked, his good humor dissipating into suspicion again. "This entire setup has their stamp all over it."

At the name "Initiative", Cyril swallowed and went suddenly pale; at the word "setup" he flinched visibly, and took a hasty step backward toward his desk. "Ah, actually... I was only peripherally involved with their project, I can't say for sure where they were visiting from..."

His hip connected with the desk. He looked down at its crowded surface, then grabbed at a stack of jewel cases and began hastily sorting through them. "Oh! Ah, um, I think I put it... Yes, it was this one. Just, just take it and go, all right?" The little researcher was starting to sweat, and something in his eyes looked a little wild. The cautious, helpful man he'd been until Ethan had mentioned the Initiative was gone, subsumed by fear.

"I thought you said you still had to burn it for us?" Wesley asked, sharply. He did not move to take the CD from Cyril's hand; instead, he took a slow step backward, pulling Ethan with him back out into the hallway.

Cyril drew in a sharp breath; it almost sounded like a sob. "If you knew, then why did you come? I didn't want to do it, you have to believe me, but... this _is_ the CD, I could have brought it to the surface, but if I didn't get you to come down here..."

"Cyril, what have you done?" Wesley hissed.

The other man threw the CD toward him, suddenly, and lunged for something under the lip of his desk; a button, probably, like the security alarms at banks. "Just go," he replied, staring desperately through the doorway in their direction.

The CD hit the boundary of Ethan's spell and abruptly disappeared from Cyril's view, joining the two men in the light-bending bubble that hid them from the cameras. Ethan made an abortive grab for it, but Wesley was already in motion and quickly tucked the thing inside his jacket.

Without further discussion, they both backed further from the doorway and turned to face the direction they'd come from. It was-- Ethan checked his wristwatch-- 2:17, and it had taken them fifteen minutes to get there from the surface. How long would it take the security teams to locate them? There were ways of finding intruders who couldn't be seen, and he had no doubt the Watchers would use all of them...

As if aware of his train of thought, the invisibility shield flared wildly and dissipated in a sudden prism of color. It wrenched sharply at his stomach, filling him with an abrupt sensation of loss. It was disorienting and alarming... but not as much as the sound he heard immediately afterward. Somewhere in his vicinity, an electrical force field had just gone up.

"Wesley," he began to say, by way of warning... but somewhere, some one obviously believed he hadn't enough to deal with yet; Wesley's fingers slipped from his arm and the man went down like a ton of bricks. The color had all fled his face, leaving him an unhealthy shade of grey, and his eyes had rolled back in his head. Whatever magical effect had wrenched at Ethan had felled Wesley like a tree. So much for trusting him to get them out.

"Bugger!" With electrical fields between him and any ordinary exit, normal escape would not be possible, even if he _were_ still invisible. He could not drag Wesley all that way. If there were ever a time to invoke Janus in his later incarnation-- the Roman god of doorways and of transportation, rather than his earlier manifestation as Chaos-- this was it. It had gotten Ethan out of the compound in Nevada once the drugs had ceased to affect him, though at great personal cost; this would be worse, but he could survive it. It would be better than being imprisoned again.

Swiftly, he knelt beside Wesley's fallen form and pulled a small knife from his pocket. He made a quick slash across Wesley's palm and then his own, and began sketching symbols on the floor around them as he chanted furiously. The full ritual was meant to take several minutes, but if he worked as fast as he could...

In mid-symbol, with one-quarter of the spell complete, he faltered to a stop. He was using blood magic, potent magic, and he had yet to feel the pressure of it rising or the faint feeling of being _watched_ that always hailed the attention of his patron deity. Nothing was happening. Nothing. In a place like this, under a prehistoric worship site and surrounded by centuries of mystical research, that should have been impossible.

"Null space. They've mastered bloody _null space_!" That would be a far more effective containment of the magically gifted than any drug. And for those whose magic _was_ their nature... He had only to look at Wesley to see the results of that. The man had wilted like a plant cut off at the root. What would happen if they brought a potential Slayer to a place like this? Or Faith herself?

What would happen to _him_ if he couldn't get out?

A cluster of footsteps approached, echoing along the smooth, tiled floor, promising him the answer to that question. A spike of fear washed through him, followed by fury, and he wished again that he'd heeded his instincts at the beginning of this little jaunt.

"Sir, put down the knife and move away from Mr. Wyndam-Price."

Well, there was one consolation about this mess; they hadn't been expecting him. They didn't know him. And he hadn't survived all these years with only Chaos as his defense.

"You didn't say the magic word," he said mildly, and looked up at the security team with his most calculating smile.

--


	10. Wishing for Justice: Anya

**Chapter Nine: Wishing for Justice**

SATURDAY, JUNE 8, 2002, 9:15 AM EST (2:15 PM GMT)  
A LIVING ROOM ON THE EAST COAST (USA)

--

"What do you mean, done?" The girl's voice was high and petulant, and she wrung her handkerchief in her hands as she spoke. "And what just happened to your face?"

Anyanka felt almost sorry for the kerchief, but even sorrier for herself; it had taken her over an hour to get the silly chit to wade through her so-called tragedy to the wishing part, and the well of tears _still_ hadn't dried up. "I meant, your wish is granted," she said, giving the girl a small, tight smile. "He won't know the touch of a woman ever again. And I guarantee that he'll know you're the reason why."

Happily, she didn't add. It hadn't exactly been his fault that the girl had gotten her feelings hurt; all he'd ever been guilty of was 'talking while male', from what Anyanka could tell. So he'd go through a life-change a little abruptly-- better than lifelong celibacy, she thought, and she'd bet any man with a sex drive would (eventually) agree.

Had the wishes always been like this? Eleven hundred years of serving up vengeance, and she'd never thought to ask if the victims deserved it. Well, so maybe that wasn't true. She'd thought about it a little, when the same woman kept calling her time after time... but she'd always put the female first. It just seemed so unbalanced in retrospect. Why wasn't there a patron saint of scorned men? Oh, right: because they'd be too manly to call on him for help. Stupid humans. They were _all_ idiots.

Well, except for the ones who sometimes weren't. And maybe that was the real reason for her irritable mood; all kinds of things could have been happening in England while she was gone. If her co-workers and business partners-- friends-- were going to risk themselves saving Faith, then she wanted to be in on the action. She couldn't use the Wish without reason, but she could still cast a mean spell or two. Stupid D'Hoffryn and his stupid quotas; she should never have taken this call.

"Ohmigod!" the girl gasped, a stunned expression on her face. The embroidered square of cloth she'd been abusing fluttered unnoticed to the floor as she clapped both palms to her pale cheeks. Anyanka braced herself for all the 'Wait a minute, I didn't really mean...' arguments that she sometimes got at this point, but the girl's next words surprised her.

"You're, like, some kind of genie or something?" The hands came down off the teenager's cheeks to clasp at her scantily-clad bosom, and her voice trembled with excitement. "And you punished him for me? Oh, wow. I didn't think that happened in real life! Do I get two more wishes now? 'Cause I'm thinking, you know, Hugh Jackman..."

And they thought I was shallow, Anyanka thought darkly. "Do I _look_ Arabic to you?" she snapped, rising from her chair and snatching up her purse in preparation to leave.

"What?" The girl flinched, her face falling with the sudden shift in mood. "I don't understand..."

"Next time you want to make a wish, do the world a favor, and _don't_. You have _no_ idea of the forces you're messing with." What kind of fairy tales did they teach these days, anyway? Who in their right mind would _want_ to summon a djinni? Anyanka shook her head, slid her purse strap on her shoulder, and exited the house as quickly as she could. Once the front door had slammed shut behind her, she tried to clear her thoughts for teleport back to England. Finally.

Of course, it wasn't that simple. She had more than her own thoughts to deal with; when she was in demon form, some part of her mind was always aware of every scorned woman on the planet. Their pain echoed in her mind like a choir of voices all trying to catch her attention. She could ignore them most of the time unless they performed the actual Anyanka-summoning ritual, but they never went away, and sometimes they were annoying enough to distract her from whatever she was doing. Hence, the serving of women who hadn't deliberately called her. This time, there was one voice that just would _not_ let her concentrate.

Oh! It was because she _knew_ the voice. Faith! She was picking up fear, worry, outrage-- something was going on, and it was about time, too. If Faith had woken up vengeful earlier, they could have wrapped up this whole mess hours ago. So much for the Scooby cavalry, Anyanka thought, and permitted herself a grim smile. With a little creativity, she could have everyone back home in time for dinner. One Slayer rescue, coming right...

Nothing. Blankness. Silence. Anyanka froze as Faith disappeared entirely from her internal radar as suddenly as she'd appeared, along with a few dozen other dim voices that she only really noticed in their absence. There was no death cry, no dimming as if they had fallen unconscious, just _silence_. Something really bad had just happened, and she had no idea what it was.

"...Hello? So, are you just playing statue now, or what?"

Anyanka blinked back to awareness and turned to see the teenager in the open doorway, staring at her. She glared back, took several steps away along the sidewalk, then gathered her energy again and focused on the London hotel. Between one breath and the next, she vanished from the walk and reappeared in her shared room.

"Anya!" Another irritating teenage voice broke in on her concentration, and Anyanka almost bit the girl's head off--metaphorically, of course-- before she realized it was Dawn and not the stupid girl she'd left behind. Buffy's little sister had still been asleep when she left, but something had happened to wake her up. She was sitting up on her bed, still dressed in pyjamas, with a startled expression on her face.

"Not now, Dawn," Anyanka said sharply, letting her face smooth back into her human features. "Something's happened to Faith; I've got to find Buffy and Giles."

Dawn sighed and rolled her eyes, then reached for the suitcase at the foot of her bed and started digging for fresh clothes. "They already know," she said, in a tired voice. "Buffy called up here a second ago wanting the rest of us to come downstairs; she said something was up. I mean, I guessed already, because she woke me up out of this nightmare... Wait a minute. How'd you know?"

It figured. That made twice this morning she thought she could be useful, and got upstaged by something else. Of _course_ the Slayers would already know when something happened to one of them. "She was there one second, all vengeful and angry, and the next she was just-- gone. I didn't even have time to find out where she was. I don't think she's dead, it's more like when Amy was trapped... Oh, why am I explaining it to you?" Anyanka threw her hands up in agitation and took a few steps toward the door.

"Wait up!" Dawn yelped, hastily tugging on a pair of jeans and a slightly wrinkled lavender tee shirt that announced she was 'Rated P for Princess.' "Let me come with you! It'll just take me a second to get ready!"

"Okay, but _hurry_. This is important."

"I'm hurrying, I'm hurrying! Just let me..." Dawn shoved her feet into a pair of thick-soled leather sandals and dashed into the bathroom. Less than a minute later she was back out, still a little disheveled-- she hadn't had time for make-up-- but her hair was smooth and her face looked freshly washed. "Okay. Let me grab my jewelry, and I'm good to go."

"That's got to be a record," Anyanka said, making a show of checking her watch. "So, are they still in the restaurant?"

Dawn nodded. She grabbed her keycard off the dresser, followed by a collection of small silver things from the nightstand, and trailed Anyanka out into the hall. "Yeah. They've been down there awhile, I guess-- I'm not sure when Buffy left the room. But she said they were still at the table when whatever it was happened."

Anyanka frowned, running the 'whatever' through her thoughts a few more times. The only time she'd ever felt anything like it before had been during large-scale human-caused disasters, like a bombing or a riot or a group execution. Things like earthquakes didn't carry the same weight-- people were angry at God or at the world, not men, and that didn't exactly fall under her purview. But, mass murder-- not that she'd put it past the Council, but something about the situation seemed _off_.

"Did Buffy specifically mention Faith?" she asked, still trying to mentally connect the dots. "Or just that something happened? Because she wasn't the only one it happened to. Dozens of voices cried out in pain, and then were silenced. Maybe they got the Potentials, too."

Dawn stared at her with wide eyes as they got onto the lift, stabbing absentmindedly at the correct button as though it were an afterthought. "Okay, now there's a disturbing thought," she said, with a little shudder. "Now you've got me thinking about honking death rays. I really hope that's not what happened; everyone's freaked enough as it is. I mean, the Council needs smashing anyway, but we need people thinking, not going kamikaze."

"Death rays?" Now it was Anyanka's turn to stare. Didn't these people understand by now that she had a weak grasp of pop-culture references?

"You know, the great disturbance in the Force? Alderaan? The Death Star?" Dawn arched her eyebrows, then lifted out of her mood long enough to give a short laugh. "Come on, I _know_ Xander made you watch Star Wars."

"What does that have to do with anything?" Anyanka objected, still a little confused.

"Nevermind." Dawn shook her head, hiding her face behind a fall of silky brown hair, and started putting on the jewelry she'd grabbed. She wore a silver cuff over the curve of cartilage on one ear, a black-and-silver band around one toe, a funky watch, and a chunky cross necklace. Nothing that required any piercing, which had made her big sister happy, but enough to catch the eye and assuage teenage vanity.

Anyanka sighed. "You're deflecting," she muttered. "Classic Xander. You shouldn't use him as a role model, you know." Grown-up or not, she still had flashes of resenting her ex. If he hadn't been so good at the deflecting thing, it could have saved them _months_ of pointless wedding plans and a way-too-public dumping at the altar. Not to mention preventing her from lending the Wish to a bunch of stupid teenagers who thought every bout of indigestion was Cupid's arrow.

Dawn rolled her eyes. "I'm not deflecting, you made an accidental quote. Besides, Xander? Totally role-model material. I mean, brave, loyal, strong? Has the occasional really great plan?"

"Plan? We have a plan?"

Anyanka blinked at the new voice, surprised to find that they'd reached their chosen floor already. The doors had slid open, revealing a pair of tired Scoobies standing a few paces out in the hall.

"Willow, Tara. Hey. How'd you get down here before we did?" Dawn complained.

Magic, Anyanka thought, but didn't say. The two witches looked as tense as she felt, but better put-together than Dawn; they'd probably used magic to get dressed in a hurry. Or Tara had, anyway. These days, the red-haired witch used her power like a battery and let her girlfriend actually cast the spells, which was more than OK in Anyanka's book. She encountered very few humans who could be a danger to her demon form, and Willow-with-no-brakes had rated pretty high on that list.

"Dawnie." Willow smiled at Dawn, then yawned and hid her mouth behind one hand; the other hand clutched at one of Tara's. The blonde witch smiled fondly at her girlfriend, then shrugged her shoulders in Dawn's direction.

"Buffy said we should hurry," Tara said simply, then let her gaze slide past Dawn to Anyanka. "Did she tell you what's w-wrong?"

"Something happened to Faith," Anyanka told her.

"Something bad, we think," Dawn added, and skipped past the others toward the restaurant. "Buffy wasn't sure exactly what."

"Of course not," Willow said, with a sigh. "I hope Giles remembered to reserve a private conference room-- I'll need a place to hook in my computer if I'm going to hack the Council's records, and Tara will need a table for the locating spells."

Anyanka rather doubted that the spells would work. But then, it couldn't hurt to try. And really, what else could they do, at this point?

A flicker of _something_ at the edge of her awareness answered her question for her. "Wait-- I can feel her again! Whoever's holding her just made a _big_ mistake."

"Anya?" Tara questioned.

She felt the crinkle of flesh as her face resumed its demon aspect, and she flashed a triumphant smile at the other girls. "Tell Giles I've gone to grant Faith's Wish," she said, and focused her concentration inward.

The hotel vanished with one quick thought.

--


	11. Movers and Shakers: Angel

**Chapter Ten: Movers and Shakers**

SATURDAY, JUNE 8, 2002, 6:49 AM PST (2:49 PM GMT)  
SUNNYDALE

--

"...get this straight. You misplaced m'nephew, you haven't found his Slayer yet, the Chaos Git is lurkin' about, and now Demon Girl's vanished. Bloody good job, Rupert. Congratulations. I thought you were meant to be finding people, not losin' 'em."

Angel blinked his way back to consciousness, staring up at the underside of the kitchen floor and trying to make sense of the half-heard conversation. Rupert? Spike was talking to Giles? Now there was a recipe for civility. Normally they got along about as well as Spike and Angel did-- in other words, they didn't.

There was a sudden crash from above, followed by the tinkle of broken glass, and a few sharp British swearwords polluted the air. "...'S nothing vital. Don't worry about it. Now, why don't you tell me... No. No, Rupes, don't pass the... Slayer! Good morning, luv. No, I don't know why he passed the... Sod it. So I dropped a box of dishes. It's not like you'll be usin' 'em in the Poof's hotel anyway... Now don't get your knickers in a twist..."

Angel rolled his eyes at the familiar nickname, then smirked as he listened to Buffy's rejoinder. When she really got going, she could wield words as well as any other weapon, and there was nothing quite like a Slayer in full snit. Since the dishes in question had been her mother's, she had a lot to say about it, too.

Dishes. His smile faded as he considered that, and he swung his legs off the makeshift bed and eyed the muffled line of light in the basement windows. It was very early-- or late-- for a vampire to be moving around up there. What was Spike up to, anyway? It wasn't like him to be that industrious.

"...ream me out yourself next time, she doesn't know when to pull her punches. So what were you callin' us about, then? Considerin' the hour, I don't buy you wanting to check up on our progress, and there's not much we can do about the lost ones from here."

Spike's voice had gone quiet and rough with the last few sentences, a tone Angel recognized from past episodes of 'William's Worried About Dru'. He still held firm to the belief that Spike was more evil than not, but he had to admit that the blond vampire did care for the ones that he called family. Dawn had fallen into that category early on, as did Buffy for reasons best left untouched, and since last month's revelations he'd apparently added Wesley to the list. Now, whether he'd turn them if he ever got the chip out, then kill and drain the ones he _didn't_ care for... that was the question that needed asking, and part of what they'd fought over the night before. Angel felt almost responsible for the younger vampire's choices, since he'd acted more as sire to him than Dru ever had-- and that was exactly why he was so suspicious of him. Angelus hadn't exactly been known for his goodness, and Spike didn't have a soul to counteract that training or his inherent bloodthirsty instincts. What possible incentive could Spike have to truly switch sides?

Giles sighed on the other end of the phone, and Angel could hear the faint familiar sound of cloth moving over glass. "I was wondering if Angel had heard from the Las Vegas contingent yet? I have a number of contacts left to try, but anything Lorne could add would be helpful, and we thought that perhaps Jonathan might have better luck tracking his father than we have. Given that Ethan apparently left the hotel at the same time as Wesley this morning, we suspect that they may have ended up at the same location."

Spike's footsteps moved across the kitchen again as he listened, and a few heavy thuds suggested more boxes being shifted into the living room. "I don't know. I haven't seen Peaches in a few hours, I went out patrolling and he was asleep when I got back. And before you ask, I didn't see a sodding thing, but that's pretty much what you expected, innit...? Wait a mo', there's a note here on the counter. Looks like they called about three hours ago to tell Angel they were on their way. I don't remember how far Vegas is, though. Why didn't you try callin' 'em direct?"

"I've tried Lorne's mobile, and Jonathan's, but they both appear to have been turned off," Giles replied. "And it's about four and a half hours by the posted limits. If they ignored the signs, and I don't see why they wouldn't, they could be there at any time. You must have them call me as soon as they arrive."

Angel sighed at Giles' estimate, then stood and brushed the creases out of his clothes and ran his fingers through his hair to check for flat spots. He'd intended to sleep through most of the day and get up to help the movers in the late afternoon, but there wasn't any way he was going back to sleep now. Not with Spike marching around upstairs and more of his crew arriving any minute.

Upstairs, Spike snorted. "Four and a half hours, he says. Done a bit of gambling, have we?"

Giles sighed. "You could just say, 'Yes, Rupert. No problem, Rupert.' And if you must know, I learnt the distance when Buffy left Sunnydale after the debacle with Acathla. I canvassed quite a bit of the country that summer."

"Yes, Rupert," Spike grumbled. "No problem, Rupert. Bend over so I can kiss your bloody arse, Rupert."

"Spike!"

"All right, all right. I'll make sure they call. Tell Nibblet hello for me, would you? I'd better get back to the packing, unless there's something else you want."

Giles sighed. "Do try not to break any more of Joyce's china."

There was a final snort from Spike, followed by a faint beep as he ended the call and then a click as the phone went back on the hook. "I didn't exactly mean to break it to begin with," he muttered, and then stomped across the floor with another heavy load.

Angel frowned and headed for the stairs, Giles' mention of Acathla stirring up more of his worries from the night before. Spike on an electronic leash was problem child enough. He had the nagging feeling that wasn't going to last much longer, and he didn't know what they'd do when it failed; he'd always had a problem staking family, and it was still iffy whether they'd try the curse. But for now-- well. Might as well get as much use out of him as he could, and shelve the worry until it was unavoidable. Fighting with him about it wasn't getting them anywhere.

"So what exactly _were_ you trying to do?" he asked, slouching against the jamb of the open basement door.

Spike jumped, nearly dropping the load he carried, and gave his grandsire a narrow-eyed glare. "Didn't see you looming there, Peaches. Thought you were going to get a bit of sleep."

He looked almost human, standing there with his arms full of cardboard boxes and smudges of dust on the dark fabric of his tee shirt and jeans. The windows were still covered, but there was enough ambient light to give his hair a faint glow and lighten up the blue of his eyes. Shansu, Angel thought suddenly, then had to suppress a sudden pang of jealousy. Spike the ambiguous, with the stink of humanity, with half the body count and the viciousness of Angelus; if they did find another Orb of Thessala and try the curse on him, who was to say who'd reach the redemption line first?

Best not to think on it; that way led to madness and beige auras, as Lorne would say. "It's kinda hard to sleep with you tossing breakables around up here," he replied, crossing his arms and casting his eyes toward the discarded box with a disapproving frown.

Spike twisted his mouth into a half-embarrassed scowl. "Yeah, well. Big boots, slippy stuff on the tiles, bound to happen sometime. Expect you heard me talkin' to Rupert, then?"

"Yeah. Something about company coming? I thought I might as well be up." He shrugged and pushed off of the doorframe, edging further into the room and eyeing the stacks of boxes Spike had lined up to move. "You know, that reminds me, I've been meaning to ask you, why do you get to call him Rupert? You irritate him worse than I do, and I've always called him Giles."

Spike blinked at him, and seemed to take the change of topic as the mood-lightener Angel had meant it to be. "It's a respect thing, I think. You met 'im back when Buffy was new here and he was all Mr. Responsible Librarian, and none of the kiddies dared to use his Christian name." He paused there and raised a dramatic eyebrow, as if to say, and how does this differ from my acquaintance with the man?

Angel chuckled. "Point taken. Okay. So what have you got done? I thought we were going to wait until tonight to finish, but we might as well hurry it up if there's trouble in England. I'd like to join them there as soon as possible."

"'Specially if we're going to have loaders on this end. They can pack it up before lunchtime, and the lot of us can caravan down before nightfall and take an evening flight over." Spike nodded, then adjusted the stack of boxes in his arms and headed for the front room with them. "I've got most everything from this floor stacked up in the living room, where the couch used to be. I'm not sure the blinds are down upstairs, but I was going to try up there next. At least half the rooms will still be in shadow, at any rate."

"Won't we need to leave someone in L.A. to unload?" That was the whole point of packing today, after all; to get the truck there and back again before Monday morning, when late fees would begin to accrue. "Not that I think it's a bad plan." He rolled up the cuffs of his shirt and got a grip on the next stack of boxes. One perk of having vampire movers: you could pack the boxes as big and heavy as you wanted, as long as you were sure the cardboard would hold up.

Spike grunted, rearranging something in the front room, then passed him in the hall with empty arms and rummaged in the kitchen for something else to carry. "Fred and Gunn, maybe," he said. "And we could call Amy back from visitin' her dad. She can play float-the-boxes, and Whiz Girl can organize to her heart's content, and her boyfriend can be all man-of-the-hotel."

Angel winced at the assessment of his friends. "Why do you do that?" he asked, genuinely curious for once about the inner workings of his grandchilde's byzantine brain.

"Do what?" Spike stopped and blinked at him again, all furrowed brow and sharp cheekbones.

"Give people ridiculous nicknames. Sum up their characters in joking little statements. I know Gunn has had problems with everyone else gaining enhancements, but I've been trying..."

Spike waved him off with a frown. "You've been too apologetic with him, is what it is. Of course he's fed up with the kid-glove treatment. And you _wonder_ why I insist on calling you Poof, out of all the semi-accurate names I give the others. You're really making a mistake with this not-Angelus attitude. He's still part of you, you know, and there's a lot of what he did that you could learn from without staining your precious White Hat too much."

There were times, Angel thought, when Spike made entirely too much sense. He spent a lot of his time making sure that Angelus stayed in his subconscious where the curse had trapped him, not out on the surface where words could slip and careless actions could hurt his friends. If his darker side could be tamed...

But of course, it couldn't. He had only to remember what he'd been like four years ago during their little revival of the Scourge, or when Rebecca slipped him the Doximal, or last year when Darla came back for him, and it all collapsed back into impossibility. How could he chance that happening again? In some other reality he might have learned balance, but as things were, it would never work.

"That's a slippery slope, William," he said, and winced again at the stress-induced brogue creeping into his voice. "And I'm not going to set foot on it."

"Your loss, mate," Spike shrugged, then gave him an unsettling, entirely-too-knowing smile.

The tableau held a few more moments, two alpha vampires eyeing each other and remembering exactly why they'd avoided spending any more time together than necessary over the last month. Then, mercifully, the tension was broken by the sound of a car pulling up out front.

"Hey guys. Fred, Gunn? Wake up, we're here."

Jonathan's voice was weary, and none of the others sounded much better as human throats yawned and car doors opened.

"Oh, stop the world, I want to get off," Lorne's plaintive voice drifted into the house. "It's been such a long day already. Think they've got any beds still set up?"

"Wouldn't bet on it," Gunn sighed. "Man, they better have coffee and a shower ready, or I'm going to go on strike."

"Charles," Fred rebuked him, softly.

Angel shook his head, breaking away from Spike's gaze with a rueful smile to head for the front door. He unlocked it, then opened it a crack and took a few steps backward, waiting for his friends to come trooping up the stairs. It felt good to know that some part of his little family was safe, even if others were still in danger. Maybe it was an illusory kind of peace, but it would have to hold him for the next few hours.

They had a lot of work to do.

--


	12. Research Party: Willow

**Chapter Eleven: Research Party**

SATURDAY, JUNE 8, 2002, 3:07 PM (GMT)  
LONDON

--

Willow rubbed at her eyes, took a deep breath, and propped her chin up with both hands. Her elbows, resting on the heavy wooden conference table, bracketed the current source of her frustration-- her laptop, which stubbornly refused to allow her access to Travers' files, no matter what approach she tried. None of the old Watcher system's backdoors were working, and she'd come very close to setting off a return-trace virus that would have fried her system.

An old joke floated through her mind: 'I worked my fingers to the bone, and what do I have to show for it? Bony fingers!' Or tired brains, in this case. Maybe if she'd kept up with the hacking community more, instead of just going techno with her magic... but it was useless to worry about that now. The Council's kung-fu was better than hers, and that was that.

"It looks like he finally dusted off your old journals and read up on Moloch," she groused, frowning across the table at Giles. "Or else he's been paying attention to the news. I mean, viruses, hackers, magic-- data integrity isn't easy to maintain if you leave your systems accessible over the Internet. I set a couple of watch-dogs in their servers myself, in case we ever wanted details about a prophecy or an apocalypse that we really need to not have been tampered with and they didn't have any serious security of their own, but someone must have taken them out before they made the changes since there weren't any messages in the email account I set up for monitoring..."

Willow's voice trailed off as Giles' eyebrows climbed steadily up his forehead. Abruptly, she realized that not only was she (a) babbling, she was also (b) revealing naughty doings to an authority figure. Not that Giles didn't _know_ what she was doing already, but even he tended to object to the scope of her online activities, and she still got that twinge deep down when the Scoobies' father figure looked at her with disapproval in his eyes. Hastily, she switched topics, covering with a sip from the barely-warm coffee cup Tara had thoughtfully placed at her elbow.

"Anyway. The last time I checked the Watcher database was a few weeks ago, just after we got the Prophecy of the Rule, and I didn't have any problems. But today-- sometime in the last couple of weeks, they put up a massive firewall. A custom one. I'd say whatever Travers is planning, he's taking it very, very seriously, and it's probably a lot bigger than just Faith; this kind of security is unbelievably expensive."

Giles frowned back at her, dangling his glasses from careless fingers and running his other hand through rumpled hair. He looked tired, as though he were unravelling round the edges, but the more exhausted he got the more his 'Ripper' side was peeking through. His and Buffy's half of their telephone conversation with Spike a little while ago had been interesting to watch, and he'd barely managed to stay civil when Jonathan called back twenty minutes later to report it would take them most of a day yet to get there. Patience was clearly not Ripper's strong suit.

"That is... disheartening, but not entirely unexpected, given the other evidence at hand." Giles took in a deep breath, then expelled it in a frustrated sigh as he looked down at the map of Britain covering most of the table's surface. Tara had done a thorough scrying on it, but it hadn't been of much use in their efforts to find Faith, Wesley, or even Anya. Dawn and Xander had used handsful of Skittles candy to mark each known Council outpost as she went, coding red for "no", green for "possible", and yellow for "too magically sheilded to tell", but their efforts had mostly been in vain; the green and yellow outnumbered the red by a factor of two to one, and there were several dozen sites so marked.

Buffy, seated next to Giles, nodded at his words and picked absent-mindedly at the leftover candies piled up at the map's edge. "We _did_ use way too many of the green ones," she said, agreeing with him. Her brow wrinkled up in a familiar worried-Buffy expression, and she threw a glance at Dawn before continuing. "There's no way they could have dragged Faith through all those places since they grabbed her, so there's got to be another reason Tara picked up so many traces of the Slayer. Something big."

"Potentials," Xander spoke up, his tone grim. He swatted Buffy's hands away from the excess Skittles and selected several purple ones for himself, then put a few in his mouth and started crunching on them. "I bet they've been collecting them. I mean, it's a given that they want Faith to die and pass on the torch. But that went pretty badly for them the last few times, so..."

Dawn sighed, idly tapping her fingers on the tome she was supposed to be reading. "Well, that fits with what Anya was saying. 'Dozens of voices'... whatever they're doing to Faith, lots of other girls are involved. How many Potentials are there, anyway? I mean, could they actually round them all up and wait for one to go super-powery?"

"It's quite possible, I'm afraid," Giles replied, looking up from the map to give the youngest Slayer a troubled look. "There are approximately fifty of them at any given time, probably between forty-five and forty-eight currently, dependent upon whether the magics governing their selection have compensated for the fact that there is more than one Slayer at the moment."

Willow stared at him, caught off guard by his unexpectedly concrete answer, then did a few quick sums in her head. "Oh. You're thinking forty-nine, total, counting Faith? That makes sense. Forty-nine is seven squared, and the number seven has all kinds of mystical significance. But if they know how many there are, why didn't they find Buffy until she was Called? And Faith said she didn't have much warning, either."

Giles sighed and put his glasses back on, then glanced toward Buffy again. "The method used to search out Potential Slayers is somewhat imprecise, and limited in range. The Council has never been quite certain that 49 was the appropriate number, in fact; there are other numbers of equal significance in that range. It is possible, however, that Travers has been able to procure a more thorough method of..."

Xander cleared his throat rather noisily. "Uh, G-Man, Wills, not that we don't appreciate the details, but I'll take a stab in the dark here and guess the short answer is 'Yes'?" He arched dark eyebrows at them, and only long years of acquaintance kept Willow from buying his innocent expression. He was bored and frustrated, not stupid; she knew that better than anyone.

Giles nodded, mouth pinched with disapproval and worry. "Yes," he answered. "Although I do wonder whether such a plan would work at all, given the latest additions to the Slayer line."

Buffy perked up, straightening in her chair and shooting a knowing look past Giles to meet her sister's eyes again. "Because of Dawn? And Wes? You mean one of them might be the trigger now? But since Dawn counts as me and I'm not it, and they probably _have_ Wes... God, even if they don't make it work with Faith, they can still..."

They were all distracted from that very disturbing line of thought by a sudden loud chiming from Willow's computer. Willow was as startled as anyone else-- she'd left a password-cracking program running on one of the sites while they were throwing ideas around, but she'd never expected it to get anywhere, especially not this quickly. It hadn't even got past the search program on common English words and combinations.

"User ID QTravers, Password slayers... I don't believe it! I got into his email!" She stared at the screen with an expression of disbelief, then laughed as a sense of triumph bubbled up from within. So much for Travers' kung-fu. She'd done it after all, her ten fingers and sharp brain running rings around the competition. No magic involved. She spared a quick glance for Tara, and saw the quiet pride in the other girl's smile; oh, yeah. It felt good.

"Some of these addresses look pretty familiar," she added, turning serious again as she paged through the list of messages in Travers' inbox with quick clicks and scrolls of the mouse. "LMorgan at wrh dot com, CMcnamara at init dot army dot mil..."

"Init dot... The Initative?" Buffy jumped to her feet in disbelief, and came around the table to lean in over Willow's right shoulder. "Colonel Mcnamawhosits that made fun of the magic gourd? But I thought he got killed in the free-for-all. I was pretty sure I saw something get its claws into him before we got out of there."

"That can't be good." Xander had followed Buffy; he braced a hand on the back of Willow's chair and bent to get a good look over her left shoulder at the screen. "Hey, and look at that-- someone sent him an email with an attachment, a big one too. An eward at wcouncil dot co dot uk." He paused to glance up at Giles, who had joined them behind Willow's chair. "Sound familiar? And it's titled 'Rollright Feed: Price, Rayne'."

"Rollright?" Tara, who'd kept out of the conversation so far, let the book she'd been holding fall to the table and stood up to peer over the surface of the map. "There's a complex at the Rollright Stones; l-look, we marked it yellow."

"Shielded," Giles said, grimly. "Willow, can you tell when that missive was sent?"

"Uh, ten minutes ago?" she hazarded, glancing from the timestamp on the electronic message to the clock on the conference room wall. "And it doesn't look like he's read it yet..."

"Can you download that video file and delete it without leaving any sort of... what would you call it... electronic fingerprint?" Giles pressed her, his voice rough with urgency. "If someone at that office has seen Wesley and Ethan, and thought to alert Travers this way..."

"No problem." Willow's fingers flew over the keys, and the familiar Download box appeared, filling slowly with color as the file copied itself to her computer. Then she carefully held down the SHIFT key and clicked the DELETE button to send the email straight to oblivion.

It had just disappeared from Travers' inbox when there was another clash of noise from the laptop's speakers. She hit ALT-F4 to exit the program in a hurry, then pulled the network cable out of the back of the laptop for good measure. "That was close," she muttered. "Someone was trying to log into his account, but I got out pretty quick. If we're lucky, the system won't notice that there were two instances of him logged in at the same time."

"And if we're not lucky?" The Voice of Doom spoke from behind her.

She sighed. "Not much we can do about that, but at least there's no way he can tell it was us. I'm sure he's got plenty of other enemies."

"One must plan for all possibilities," Giles chided her.

"I hate to say it, but Giles is right," Xander spoke up. "Plan for the worst, hope for the best, and there'll be a lot fewer surprises."

"Doesn't mean he can't be more cheerful about it," Dawn groused. "It's not like there's much planning we can do, anyway."

"Nevermind all that," Buffy broke in, irritably. "Focus, guys. We just got a clue, didn't we? Less worrying, more doing."

"Doing what?" A voice sounded at the door, and Cordelia entered the room, bearing a few shopping bags full of small necessities that they'd overlooked in their hasty escape from California. She and Groo had been all too happy to put off book-duty with a quick trip to nearby stores. "Do we know something new?"

"We're about to, I think," Willow told her, then double-clicked on the video file's icon. It opened in a small window on the laptop screen, and she tilted it carefully so that everyone could see.

At first, it just showed an ordinary view of a plain, institutional-type corridor. White walls, tile, a boring looking guy in a lab-coat... wait. A _nervous_ guy in a labcoat, throwing hesitant glances over his shoulder at empty air as he approached a closed door. He swiped his passcard through it, said something outloud, and then disappeared from the camera's viewpoint. Nothing else happened for several seconds, and the people gathered around Willow's desk held their collective, frustrated breath waiting for the title characters of the piece to show up. Any second now...

There! There was a flash of something in the doorway that disappeared almost instantly, then a wildly fluctuating burst of color a bit farther out in the hall. "Invisibility spell," Willow heard Giles mutter, as Wesley and Ethan Rayne suddenly appeared. Ethan looked startled; Wesley looked ill, and collapsed almost immediately to the floor.

"I've never s-seen a spell break up like that before," Tara said hesitantly, somewhere off to Willow's left.

"Neither have I," Giles replied, softly, then swore. "Oh, bugger. I'd wondered how Ethan escaped the Initiative. Daft bastard; that spell could kill _both_ of them."

It was easy to see what Giles was referring to. Willow didn't have much experience of blood magic, save the spell used to bring Buffy back, but the symbols the aging sorcerer was drawing on the floor were not hard to interpret if you knew what to look for. It wasn't a good thing.

Neither was Ethan's sudden pause, or the shock on his face, or the sudden approach of foot soldiers from the edge of camera range. "It was a trap," Xander commented, unnecessarily, as they watched the security team move forward.

"When did this happen?" Cordelia asked, as they watched the stand-off progress. Ethan refused to give up his knife, but the soldiers all had familiar tazer-like weapons, and they were working on encircling the pair.

"About forty-five minutes ago," Willow informed her, checking the timestamp on the corner of the image.

"Damn it," the Seer commented, frowning. "I was awake then. So why didn't the Powers show me something? I mean, come on. This is Wesley we're talking about, you think they'd be worried about his welfare."

"Because he's okay?" Dawn suggested. "Look, he's getting up."

"Good Lord, how many weapons does the man carry?" Xander joked, as a pair of swords suddenly appeared from nowhere in Wesley's hands. The ex-Watcher still looked pale and far older than his years, but his stance was sure. Ethan gave him a startled look, then grinned ferally and took one of the swords. The security team backed off abruptly, and started yelling something, back over their shoulders toward the office the pair had visited.

"Since when do you sound like Giles?" Buffy muttered in reply, then laughed suddenly. "How much you want to bet they're asking that guy why he didn't take their weapons?"

"No bet," Xander replied.

The film clip came to an abrupt halt at that point, returning to a black screen. "That's it!" Cordelia objected.

"That's it," Willow said, reluctantly. "The guy that sent it was probably going to send the next couple of segments the same way, but we weren't online long enough to find out."

Giles rested a hand on her back for a moment, in a sort of silent good-job-Willow message, then left the cluster of people around the laptop to rest a long, callused finger on the yellow Skittle sitting in Oxfordshire. "Regardless of what happened next, at least we know more than we did before. We know where they were less than an hour ago, and we know that they were alive at that time."

"And we know the Council can neutralize magic, at least in certain circumstances," Willow said, with a worried glance at Tara. "If we're going in there..." she began, warningly.

"If?" Cordelia interrupted, in tones of disbelief.

"We'll be careful," Tara said, finishing Willow's statement in tones of reassurance.

"But we're not waiting for reinforcements," Buffy added, firmly. "We're going now."

No-one argued with her.

--


	13. Tea Time: Lydia

**Chapter Twelve: Tea Time**

SATURDAY, JUNE 8, 2002, 3:58 PM (GMT)  
LOCATION UNKNOWN

--

Lydia paused outside the door of the 'guest' bedroom, breathing deeply and trying to keep her hands from shaking. It did no good for her image to have the teacups rattling on the tray, no matter how nervous she was.

She could think of only two possible scenarios that she might encounter on the other side of that door. She would encounter Faith dead, willing victim of Travers' poison, or else Faith enraged, seizing the opportunity of the open door to attempt her escape. Even without Slayer strength, the girl was a menace; Lydia had seen Travers' morning reports, and had been impressed by the amount of damage she had wrought. Neither probability was very encouraging, and both had rather negative implications for Lydia's future wellbeing. The probability of a positive outcome was small. Nevertheless...

"I volunteered for this," she reminded herself, then straightened her spine and inclined her head at the Council flunky travelling in her wake. The young man-- Percy, was it?-- pulled a slim golden key from his pocket and turned it in the lock.

The process looked simple, but wasn't-- at least, not ordinarily. No one was quite sure as yet whether static enchantments were affected by the 'void spell' Travers' research teams had finally perfected, or if only biological organisms were magically suppressed. Regardless, the lock was a great deal more substantial than it appeared, both physically and otherwise. Enough to keep all unauthorized persons out, and all disgruntled supernatural beings in.

The tumblers engaged, and Percy gave her a weak smile before withdrawing the key and scurrying hastily out of range. Clearly, he was betting on the she's-alive option; most of the Watchers were. They still planned to stop Faith's heart, of course, but she would make a singularly effective weapon afterward, once she had been re-educated. The only Potential who came close to her level of skill or to Buffy's abilities was Kennedy, and that young woman would be far more useful in the role of trainer than as a fighter. For the next few years, the new Council would still need Faith in the lone warrior's role.

Lydia needed Faith too, although Travers would be surprised if he knew what for. Travers may have taken control of the cream of the Watcher hierarchy and property when he embarked on his multiple-Slayer project, but that didn't mean that all those who accompanied him endorsed his philosophies. Some, like Lydia, functioned as spies, acting on behalf of more conservative groups.

Of course, she admonished herself, she would not have much chance of thwarting Travers if she kept standing here like Schrödinger speculating about the fate of the cat! With a final weak smile for Percy, she balanced the tea tray with one hand and dropped the other to the doorknob.

The wooden portal opened slowly, giving her a narrow view of the room's sparsely furnished, elegant interior. There were no sounds of movement inside, but neither was there a corpse on the bed, and a spark of hope took up residence in the back of her mind. Quickly, she stepped inside, and tried not to flinch as Percy pulled the door shut and locked it behind her.

"Well, well, what have we here?" Yes; Faith was alive, and hadn't lost any of her attitude. "Ol' Rich too busy to follow up himself? What, did they think I wouldn't fight a woman? Lady, I got news for you; after the disaster that was Gwendolyn, I don't give a shit what gender you are."

Lydia turned her head to the right, moving slowly in an attempt to avoid any behavior that might provoke a violent reaction. Faith's voice was husky with pain and exhaustion, and as the girl came into Lydia's field of vision she could see that the Slayer looked as bad as she sounded. She was pale, marked with livid bruises on her face, arms, and chest, and her immodest clothing undoubtedly concealed many other injuries. Her face was set in a mocking grin, but there was no sparkle in her eyes; they were empty and haunted.

"I am not here to fight you," Lydia said, carefully. "I was sent to ascertain what fate you had chosen, and as the deadline coincided with afternoon tea..." She gestured with the tray.

Faith's eyes widened in disbelief. "What, you think I'm going to just sit down and drink that shit with you? Do I look stupid?"

Lydia allowed herself a small smile. "No. After all, your suspicions are correct; everything on this tray has been saturated with drugs. I was given an antidote before I came." Magic-based, naturally, and possibly ineffective in the magic-less zone that encompassed the house; a 'necessary risk', according to Travers.

Faith looked a bit startled at her bluntness, but the girl's expression closed up again immediately. "And you're telling me this because...?" she prompted, crossing her arms and throwing a suspicious glance at the door. "What, intimidation's not working, so you're gonna try and trick me into trusting you?"

The tray was getting heavier with every moment, but Lydia didn't want to move and risk disrupting the dialogue. She took a deep breath and continued. "I'm fairly certain that that would be a waste of my time; I know of your past history with the Council. You may believe me or not as you choose. All I ask for is that you listen to what I have to say."

"Make her tell you what they did to me, first," a new voice said, very firmly. A _familiar_ voice, actually, one that brought back bad memories of Lydia's one and only trip to Sunnydale.

"Anya Jenkins?" Lydia forgot all about maintaining eye contact and avoiding sudden movement and turned immediately toward the room's third occupant. "What... what are you doing here? This room was sealed, I checked it myself before they brought Faith in... and how on Earth could you know where she was?" Her eyes darted involuntarily to the heavily leaded, barred window, and then back to the angry, determined blonde. "Is, is Rupert Giles with you? Or the other Slayer?"

"Nope. Just me. Buffy told everyone I was an ex-demon when you visited us, don't you remember? Not that I appreciated her revealing my secret, but I thought for sure you would look me up in the Watcher chronicles after you left. I _know_ I'm in them."

"Ah, actually..." Lydia gave up on the tray and set it on the floor to the left of the door, then laced her fingers together in an effort to keep from wringing her hands. "We were rather busy, what with Glory..."

Anya rolled her eyes. "I was a vengeance demon. Anyanka, patron saint of scorned women? Anyway, I'm back in the game now, and even your tiny Watcher mind should be able to guess what I'm doing here."

"V-vengeance?" Lydia blinked at the girl-- demoness-- in shock. This hadn't been in any of Mr. Giles' Watcher Diaries; he'd mentioned Anyanka, yes, but not that she'd somehow become human and joined his little band of civilian associates. What else had the man concealed over the years?

The sound of snapping fingers startled her and drew her attention back toward Faith. "In other words, you don't have any idea why she's suddenly as human as I am?" the Slayer asked, her voice sharpened with annoyance. "At first I thought it was the drugs, but when Anya showed up... Wait. This doesn't make any sense. Why would they send you in here clueless? I mean, two on one odds, if we'd decided to jump you..."

The backhanded reference to the void spell re-centered Lydia somewhat, reducing her confusion. At least _that_ made sense. A vengeance demon's abilities would be blocked by the spell just as any magical being's would, but Anyanka might have had time to teleport in when the spell had faltered briefly earlier in the afternoon. Well. Two would be much more difficult to release than one, but if Lydia could get them outside the boundaries... This changed things, considerably. Putting a stop to Travers' plan might be easier than she had feared, if she had the power of the Wish at her disposal.

"It's a general spell," she explained hurriedly, "not a specific one, and it limits us as much as you; we didn't even know whether you were alive. I doubt anyone knows she's in here. If, If I help you, if I tell you how it was done and get you out of here, will you exempt me from any vengeance you might Wish on the Council?"

At her oblique reference to the goblet of poison, Faith glanced quickly toward its presence on the bedside table. "Explain it to us first," she said warily. "You know, as a gesture of good faith." She snorted at her inadvertent self-referent, then waved her hand toward the bed. "Go on. Sit down. Talk. They don't expect you back out there anytime soon, do they? I mean, since you were bringing tea, and all."

"Actually, they do," Lydia said, with an apologetic frown. "They would expect the tea to render you unconscious almost immediately. I know this must sound suspicious to you, but if you will help me get you out of this house, you'll be outside the boundaries of the void and your abilities should immediately return. The spell takes too much power and preparation to adjust it quickly, so we should have several minutes to make good our escape."

"Void? As in void spell?" Anya raised her eyebrows at Lydia, then cast a shocked glance at Faith. "You mean they've managed to reconstruct a magic-exclusive internally-focussed shield matrix? I hate to break it to you, but we're not going anywhere until they take the thing down. There was a _reason_ the lords of Arashmahar tried to burn all copies of those spells out of existence; they're _trap_ spells. And they don't make any distinction between sub- and super-human sentient beings." Her voice got angrier with every word, until Lydia was sure Percy would hear her out in the hall.

"Like Slayers," Faith said, quietly, and sat down on the bed, a dismayed expression on her face.

"What?" Lydia was in shock. Again. This was supposed to be a simple rescue; well, perhaps not _simple_, but at least uncomplicated. What more could go wrong? "I've seen Quentin's working notes, and there's no mention of traps, or shields, or anything else you've just mentioned!"

"Of course not!" Anya exclaimed. "The documentation got destroyed with the original spells; no one was supposed to ever cast them again. I only know because D'Hoffryn was involved. So, yes, it can trap Slayers. And demons. And werewolves. Even elemental mages like Giles. This thing will catch anyone whose DNA or aura is significantly different from a normal human's. The Church even tried to use them as witch-traps for a few years, but of course most witches and sorcerers aren't different enough from the average person for the spell to hold them, it just stops them making magic. That's irony for you."

Lydia tried to take a step back and fetched up against the wood of the door. Her knees folded and she went down a little heap, finding herself seated on the floor next to the tea tray. "Then we can't stop them," she said, feeling as though all her hopes were crumbling to dust like a newly-Slain vampire. "If you can't get out... They'll kill you, Faith, just for a moment, and then repeat the process with every new Slayer until they can activate no more. Then they'll drug them into obedience. An army of Slayers might sound like a good idea in principle, but under Travers' control..." Her voice faded out in horror.

Faith shuddered. "An evil Slayer army, huh? Figures. From what B said, he's not exactly Boy Scout material."

Lydia sighed. "Travers never forgave Buffy for her attitude when we came to review her before her last confrontation with Glory. She said a number of things that didn't set well with him..."

"'Power. I have it. They don't. This bothers them'," Anya quoted, her gloom lifting a little. Apparently, this was a pleasant memory for her. "She really put him in his place."

"Go B," Faith muttered.

"Actually, it was more, 'You're Watchers. Without a Slayer, you're pretty much just watchin' Masterpiece Theater.'" Lydia reflected back on the surprise of that moment, of Travers' capitulation and his anger afterward. The long flight home had been very unpleasant. "When Rupert returned to England without Buffy that fall-- well, we didn't even have marginal control of _her_ any longer, and as policy at that time forbid arranging Faith's death in prison..."

"He decided to make sure he'd have total control of the rest of the Slayers, for pretty much ever," Faith said, bluntly. "If it works, anyway."

"If? It worked for Buffy," Lydia reminded her. "Kendra was called, then Sherise, then you, and Buffy remained the Slayer throughout. The principle should hold true even when there are nearly fifty of you."

"Sherise?" Faith's eyebrows went up. "That's news to me. There was another Slayer?"

Lydia shook her head. "She was killed in her first active week. That happens to more Slayers than the Council would like to admit."

Faith shook her head. "Damn. But you know, all of this was before the Hellmouth went AWOL and the Prophecy of the Rule went active. What if the rules have changed?" Her tone of voice was lighter now, almost speculative, and she threw another long glance at the pewter goblet.

"The what? I, the Hellmouth is in Los Angeles, yes, we know that, but... AWOL? And what do you mean about the Prophecy of the Rule? I have not heard of it." Lydia just shook her head, feeling the beginnings of a migraine throbbing along the edges of her awareness. This was an unmitigated _disaster_. She set the heels of her hands to her eyes, and tried to breathe deeply.

"Not many people have," Faith said quietly.

"Oh. Oh!" Anya suddenly exclaimed, a strange excitement in her voice. "The Hellmouth... Do you know how _dark_ this kind of spellwork is? If the Watchers cast very many of them..."

Faith laughed softly. "Guess we're gonna have a English Hellmouth. Wes'll love that."

Lydia opened her eyes again and stared at her. "You can't be serious."

One corner of Faith's lifted in a bitter half-smile, and some of the life returned to her eyes. "Get out of here, Watcher-lady. Get word to G-Man, and Wes; if anyone can help, they can." She turned to Anya next, with a shrug of her shoulders. "Sorry, Ahn; I hope you can get out when they drop the spell. If they've only got it up because of me..." She looked at the goblet again, then took a deep breath, shifted to the edge of the bed, and reached for it.

"Guess I better start trusting the Powers sometime," she muttered, then tossed the contents of the pewter cup back and swallowed.

"Faith!" Anya objected loudly, rushing to her side. "What did you do that for? I was supposed to grant your Wish so everything would be okay!"

"Grant someone else's," the Slayer told her, through black-stained lips.

"Faith..." Lydia didn't know what else to say. What could she say? Faith had chosen Death; there was no salvaging anything, now.

"It's okay," the Slayer whispered, collapsing backward onto the bed. Her head turned toward Lydia, giving the Watcher full view of her face as she paled even further and her lips began to turn blue. "Dreamed... she said... my choice. Five by... five. Be... okay." Her voice went quieter with every word, then fell silent; her eyelids fluttered closed over dark, glazed eyes, and every muscle went suddenly limp.

"She's dead," Anya said, unnecessarily.

Lydia dropped her forehead to her knees and just breathed, crying without tears. What were they going to do now?

--

**Author's Note**: _The Lydia of this chapter is meant to be the Lydia Chalmers of B:tVS "Checkpoint" (5.12), but as we learn almost nothing of her there, she's basically an OC with the name and Sunnydale visit stuck on._

--


	14. Guarded Optimism: Fred

**Chapter Thirteen: Guarded Optimism**

SATURDAY, JUNE 8, 2002, 9:00 AM PST (5:00 PM GMT)  
SUNNYDALE

--

It was the _emptiness_ of the house that was getting to Fred.

It wasn't really physically empty, of course. Even with the furniture gone, Buffy's house didn't have the echoey stillness that used to live in the upper rooms and back corners of the Hyperion. There were still piles of tightly-packed boxes labeled in forest green Magic Marker, drifts of dust that hadn't yet been swept, and several living (or not) moving beings cluttering up the planes and angles of the architecture.

None of that stopped her from feeling as though she were standing in a ruined church, emptied of its inhabitants and its purpose. With every box the boys moved and every swipe of her dusting-cloth over the baseboards, a little more of its soul seemed to fade away. Maybe she was just imagining things-- she'd had too little sleep over the past couple of days and not enough coffee to make up the difference-- but the entire building felt as though it were mourning, and she couldn't help the occasional shiver in response.

Maybe it _was_ mourning. In a town like Sunnydale you never could tell. Maybe something of Joyce had lingered in the spaces between the walls, watching over her daughters after her death, resenting these strangers who'd come to take their things. Maybe it _wasn't_ the fault of some demon or spy that the sales contracts kept falling through...

Fred shook her head with a half-laugh, and turned up the corners of her mouth in embarrassment. "I sure do have a morbid imagination," she scolded herself, then sat back on her heels to brush stray wisps of hair out of her eyes. It had been, oh, hours now since they'd started with the moving and the cleaning, and her once-tidy braid had begun to get its own ideas about organization.

"You say somethin', Fred?" Charles called from the upstairs hall.

"No," she called back, thinking again about all that had gone on in this house-- the tales Angel and Wesley and Faith had told her of the Summers family, of Scooby meetings, and of youth left behind. "Just thinkin' out loud."

"Oh, that's cool," he answered, stomping down the stairs with a couple of garbage bags clutched in his arms. They bulged in strange places, like some kind of demonic egg-sacs, but she knew they probably only held shoes; this wasn't Pylea, after all, even if she sometimes felt like she was still back in that cave, dreaming of the real world. She suppressed a shudder, and gave him a tired smile.

"You almost done with that room?" he continued, returning the smile with cheerful warmth. "We're nearly done packin' the big stuff, if you want to wait and finish the cleaning next week. The quicker we get outta here, the better."

She sighed, set the rag down and stood, dusting her palms on her jean-clad thighs. "Sounds good to me. I should probably check for messages before we go, but that'll only take me a minute... the phone line's still connected, right?"

"Far as I know," he said, with a shrug. "We got a hold of Angel here earlier, right?"

"Oh, right." She laughed softly at herself again, then took a couple of steps away from the wall towards Charles' tall form. "Guess I'm more tired than I thought."

His smile gentled as she approached, and he leaned forward just a bit to meet her as she planted two small hands on his wide, muscled chest and stretched up for a quick kiss. "Mmm. Just a couple more hours, girl. We get to L.A., we can nap on the plane; it's a long flight over."

Fred wrinkled her nose at him. "I don't usually look forward to flying, but I think I'll make an exception this time."

He gave her another quick peck on the lips, then stepped back and adjusted his grip on the garbage sacks. "Did I mention how cute you look in that T-shirt?"

She rolled her eyes. The T-shirt in question was an oversized, wrinkled black thing out of Jonathan's travel bag, adorned with the self-mocking caption, 'Im a pogramar, Iam a programer, I'm a pogramor, I write code.' All but the last phrase were X'ed out. Of course Charles would get a kick out of it. "I thought you said I always look cute?" she teased him.

"You know what I mean." He rolled his eyes, too, then winked and stepped around her, heading out toward the moving truck. She followed him with her eyes, feeling obscurely comforted by his warm, protective presence, then turned to the front door and felt for the car keys in her pocket. Her laptop was still out in the trunk with the rest of their gear.

It didn't take long to retrieve the portable computer, hook it into the phone line, and perch on the counter while the software booted up. Fred didn't think there would be anything of dire importance waiting for her-- everyone knew the phone number of the house, and they all _should_ have cell phones-- but she still felt she should check. The extended Scooby gang wasn't the only group of people she was in contact with, and with everything so topsy-turvy she didn't want to miss any significant information.

There were twenty-three new messages in her e-mail box, but sixteen of them were obvious "Bulk Mail" (the new, politically-correct name for spam) and four were from the various online message groups she subscribed to. She deleted the junk, transferred the others to a temporary folder, and scrutinized the return addresses on the remaining three. The one from redwitch at ucsunnydale dot edu had an enormous attachment, which always made her leery of viruses, but there was no way that title could come from a mass marketer: 'Fwd: Rollright Feed: Price, Rayne'. It looked like Willow had found something.

Fred opened the message and set the file to download, then went back to look at the other two while it was busy. Both were from "ghost" addresses, generated by watchdog systems she'd set up-- ghost at init dot army dot mil, and ghost at wrh dot com. The spy software snooped all incoming and outgoing email on those servers for specific names and keywords, something she'd come up with over the last few months with Willow's expert help. She'd never expected what she saw now, though; both messages bore the exact same title. Someone had sent a message _from_ Wolfram & Hart _to_ the Initiative.

"Regarding Hostile 17 and behavioral modification technology," she read aloud, then shivered. "That can't be good."

"Did you say Hostile 17?" An alarmed voice drifted toward her from the kitchen doorway.

Fred bit her lip and looked up to meet Angel's concerned gaze. "Looks like the Initiative isn't as dead as we thought," she said, "or Wolfram & Hart."

"Oh, that's just great." Angel threw up his hands, then strode into the kitchen with a heavy scowl. "With everything else that's going on, of _course_ we need to worry about someone turning off Spike's chip."

She sighed and looked back down at the screen, then clicked on the Wolfram & Hart version of the message. Angel was being a little melodramatic about the whole thing, but then again, he probably had a point. The Spike that Fred had met was a sarcastic, fierce fighter for the Light and an intelligent research partner, but she knew from Angel's alter ego how easily a vampire could shed his 'goodness' and return to his true nature. She shifted a little on the counter, feeling the reassuring length of a stake in the pocket of the shorts Jonathan had lent her, and summarized the text of the message aloud.

--

_"Dear Col. McNamara,_

_It has recently come to my attention that your Sunnydale facility was not completely destroyed as was previously reported, and that the research and equipment from those premises might still be extant, in some form._

_...In the interests of continued cooperation between your superiors and mine, I therefore request any and all information or technology pertaining to the being labeled Hostile 17... The Los Angeles branch of our firm recently had the fortune to acquire him, and we would appreciate a more certain method of controlling his actions._

_...You will, of course, receive proper compensation for your assistance._

_Lilah Morgan."_

--

Angel swore under his breath, and started pacing back and forth behind her. "Had the fortune? As in past tense? Damn it. When was that message sent?"

Fred checked the timestamp in the message header; it had been sent early that morning, at oh-three-twenty-seven in the morning. She checked the ghost message produced by the Initiative server to make sure there hadn't been a glitch in one of the clocks, and found it stamped at oh-three-thirty-one. "About three-thirty this morning," she said with a frown. "Spike was here that whole time, right?"

"That's just the thing," Angel said, stopping in his tracks to make distressed gestures with his arms and expression. "We had a big fight at two-something this morning, and he went storming out of the house to look for a 'bit of rough and tumble'. What if they caught him, did something to his chip, and returned him just before dawn? He's been a little off today, like he's got something on his mind. If they got to him..." He let his voice trail off suggestively.

"I don't know," she replied, with a pensive frown. "That seems kinda sudden to me. Even if Lilah did happen to show up in Sunnydale at just the right time and grab him, that's really short notice for the Initiative to respond. Besides, he's not all that subtle. If he hasn't started getting violent or killing people..."

"Who hasn't started killing people?" Charles' voice carried into the kitchen, and he poked his head in from the hallway. "Angel? We got trouble? The truck's all loaded, and we got Spike out there in the back with the furniture. Jonathan and Lorne are makin' sure the house is all locked up. Unless there's somethin' going on here, we're ready to go."

Angel glanced at Fred, then at Charles, then shook his head and heaved an unnecessary sigh. "No, I think we're fine. Nothing to worry about-- yet. Hey, why don't you and Fred both ride up front with Jonathan? We can leave the car here, and I'll sit in the back of the truck with Lorne and Spike."

Charles frowned at them both, aware something was up, but he didn't argue. "Yeah, okay. We'll have to come back up next week anyway to get the little stuff, we can get the car then."

Fred checked the download box on the digital video file, and was pleased to see that it had finished. She could always watch it on the way-- she'd call Willow from Jonathan's cell phone if she needed more information. "Just make sure you get everything out of the trunk," she told Charles, and started the process of shutting her computer down.

Angel snorted. "Yeah. We don't want to leave anything important behind, after all the trouble you went to getting it out of Vegas."

Charles sighed. "Okay, no problem. You might as well go on out to the truck; there's shade still, if you hurry. Fred?"

She pulled the modem cord from the wall jack and hurriedly stowed laptop, cord, and power plug in the carrying case she'd brought. "All done," she assured him.

"Good." He took the computer from her and shoo'ed her in the direction of the downstairs bathroom. "We probably won't be making any stops, so... anyway, we'll be waiting out front."

The reminder owed as much to the fact that she tended to forget everything in favor of her current research project as it did to her years in Pylea without amenities; Charles had gotten used to reminding her about the little things, and she'd almost stopped getting embarrassed about them. He was good that way, comforting and strong when she needed him to be, and never made her feel like the outcast she'd been all her life. He made her feel included, part of something, cherished and protected; if she was honest with herself, that was why she'd turned to him instead of Wesley. It hadn't had anything to do with the incident when Billy's violence had possessed Wes and made him attack her, as scary as that had been. With Wesley they'd have been two of a kind against the world. With Charles, she was just... loved. She had a sneaking suspicion that Faith was now doing the same for Wes, which made Fred feel much better about the whole thing.

Business taken care of, she took a moment to tuck the loose hairs back into her braid and splash some cool water on her tired face. The house had fallen silent around her; everyone else had gone outside, leaving her to secure the front door on her way out.

She paused in the front hall to glance around the bare front room, feeling that 'something of Joyce' again, the grieving spirit she'd imagined earlier. Maybe it was all in her head, but then again, maybe it wasn't. The Summers women had fought evil from this house for five long years, the entire length of Fred's time in Pylea, before falling to forces beyond their control and leaving Dawn behind to mourn them. Buffy had rejoined the living, but Joyce had not, and spirits never slept easily in this town.

"They're safe, Joyce," Fred said aloud, feeling a little silly. "They're just moving to L.A. They're beautiful, and strong, and they'll going to keep on making you proud. It's okay to let them go now."

Yes, maybe it was all in her head, but she could have sworn the air brightened at her words, and she felt much better going out the front door than she had walking in, hours earlier.

Now, if they could just get Faith back okay, and Wesley, and make sure Spike didn't go crazy on them... Well. It was just another day in their business. Everything would work out OK in the end; it always did. Eventually.

--


	15. Potential Problems: Kennedy

**Chapter Fourteen: Potential Problems**

SATURDAY, JUNE 8, 2002, 4:35 PM (GMT)  
LOCATION UNKNOWN

--

"This is just like summer camp," Kennedy groaned, and slumped back onto her bed with her pillow over her face. Not that it helped any; with forty-three girls sharing one large dormitory space, things were just a _little_ noisy.

No, scratch that, she thought. It wasn't even like summer camp. At camp she got to ride, hike, canoe, play tennis, water ski, swim... it didn't matter how many girls she had to share her showers and sleeping space with, she could spend most of the day outdoors doing whatever she wanted. Best of all, for those precious weeks she was free of her parents, her Watcher and her rigid daily schedule. This place, on the other hand, was more like her idea of Hell.

It already felt like she'd been here forever, and it had only been four days. Some of these girls had been here for _weeks_. Whatever else you could say about Travers-- and Thera had said plenty-- the guy _did_ plan ahead. As soon as those lawyers in L.A. had magicked the Hellmouth away from Sunnydale, he'd started reeling the Potentials in hand over fist. Thera had dug her feet in so Kennedy wouldn't miss her high school graduation, but most of them had been uprooted without so much as a by-your-leave.

The bunk shuddered suddenly, interrupting Kennedy's thoughts, and the springs below her squeaked. She pulled the pillow off her face and frowned across the room at the clock on the wall-- 4:39-- then rolled over on her stomach and let her head hang down over the edge.

"'Manda?" she asked, shaking the curtain of long, brown hair out of her eyes. "I thought you had training 'til six. What's up?"

The lanky fifteen-year-old blinked up at her, biting at the edge of her lip with a worried expression on her face. "I'm not sure. They just came and told us-- Rona and me-- that our extra training was cancelled for today and that we should go back to the dorm."

"That can't be good." Kennedy frowned, then lifted her head and glanced around at the other twenty-one bunks. Most of them were occupied-- more than usual for this time of day. Amanda and Rona weren't the only Potentials with little or no training prior to coming here, and some of the younger ones spent long hours in the library doing extra schoolwork. For them to suddenly all be here at this hour of the day meant the Watchers had some kind of lecture planned, or pep talk, or something else mind-numbingly boring.

"Do, um, do you think it has something to do with that girl they brought in on the stretcher?" Amanda asked, hesistantly. "The one in the leather pants? She looked kinda familiar to me, but I couldn't remember where from. And they said all of us were here, already. So she can't be another Potential."

On the next bunk, a red-headed girl-- Kennedy thought she'd been introduced as Vi-- heard Amanda's speculation and swung around toward them, dangling her legs over the edge of the top mattress. "Oh, you mean the girl they took up to the main house when we were all supposed to be at lunch? I saw her! And I think I know who it is." Her voice dropped to a hush, and she darted her eyes from side to side before continuing as if checking for eavesdroppers. "It's the Slayer. You know, the second one. I heard she's been in jail or something; I guess they decided they need her too, for whatever it is we're all here for."

"The _second_ Slayer?" Kennedy objected, frowning at Vi. "That can't be right. Thera must have given me The Speech a thousand times and it clearly says..."

"_One_ girl in all the world, yeah, we know." Vi's bunkmate, Annabelle, walked up the aisle and plopped down on the lower mattress. "Are you still going on about that, Vi?" she asked, sounding bored, then unwound the towel from her damp hair and fished around in her toiletries case for a brush.

Vi didn't get the chance to answer. The doors to the hall all opened at once, and three tweed-clad young Watchers with clipboards started walking down the aisles, checking warm bodies against their lists. Kennedy frowned at them, then glanced back to the doors in time to see an older man in an expensive suit walk in, followed by a pair of nannies and the four youngest Potentials, who were all under the age of five. They'd been kept away from the rest others until now, but Kennedy had heard them crying from time to time when she walked by the nursery on her way to the cafeteria. They didn't look much happier now. Behind them all trailed a mousy-looking woman with glasses and a sloppy bun who kept wringing her hands as she glanced around the room; there were smudges under her eyes, as if she'd been crying and hadn't had time to do a good repair job on her makeup.

"This can't be good," Amanda whispered from the bunk below, unconsciously repeating Kennedy's earlier words.

Kennedy frowned in agreement, then straightened her spine and gave all her attention to the man in the suit. He'd gotten a microphone from somewhere, and he had that air about him that said 'Guy in Charge'. 'Guy in Charge with a Stick up his Ass', actually, but she didn't care so much about _that_ as someone finally telling them what was going on.

The nannies settled their four small charges on the one spare bed-- forty-three girls in twenty-two bunkbeds had left one mattress over-- then filed out of the room, ignoring the other occupants. A moment later, the guys with the clipboards finished counting heads and took up positions at the end of each row, giving solemn nods to their leader to verify that everyone was there. The man accepted each nod with a minute tilt of his head, then tapped the microphone to be certain it was on and cleared his throat in preparation to speak.

"My name is Richard Wyndam-Price," he began bluntly, "and you are all Potential Slayers. For some of you, this is all very new; for most of you, however, you have trained in this role for many years. Tonight, for all of you, that will change."

He took a deep breath, then continued, with the air of a history professor beginning a boring, but necessary, lecture. "In 1998, Buffy Summers, the active Slayer, was drowned in a pool of water at the hands of a master vampire. She was revived shortly thereafter, disrupting a good many prophecies in the process; one of the consequences of that incident was the Calling of a second Slayer. For... many reasons... this information was kept on a need-to-know basis, but we have moved beyond that now. The most recent Slayer of that line died not an hour ago, and one of you will be Called to replace her."

The room erupted in a chaotic chatter of shocked whispers at that statement. Vi's fierce exclamation-- "I knew it!"-- carried clearly to Kennedy's ears, and despite the tempting hope that she might _finally_ get to be the Chosen One instead of an almost-was, something about the situation felt very wrong to her. This Windbag guy was very obviously _not_ telling them that the dead Slayer had actually been here, in the complex. Kennedy believed Vi on that score; the girl seemed a little excitable, but not the type to make this up out of thin air. Had the Watchers killed her? Why? And what did Thera know about this? Kennedy hadn't seen her Watcher since their arrival.

Mr. Wyndam-Price waited a moment for the whispering to die down a little, then raised his hand and cleared his throat with a polite little "Ahem." The Potentials fell silent again, and he continued his little speech. "We have asked you to gather here in order to determine the identity of the next Slayer as quickly and easily as possible. Please, do not attempt to fight the process. Just relax, and when you awaken, you may be sure that the world will be a much more exciting place." He smiled thinly at them, eyes glittering, then handed the microphone to the female Watcher who had come in with him.

Shit, Kennedy thought. They were going to be put to sleep? Was it just her, or did that seem a little weird? Wouldn't it be obvious soon anyway, when the new Slayer started showing more strength and speed than the others? Or were they just doing this to see if one of them would have Slayer Dreams? That didn't seem right; they could wait 'til tonight for that, too. She glanced quickly around at the other Potentials in the room to see if anyone else was having the same kind of thoughts, but the faces nearest her were all bright with suspense and excitement.

A rustle of sheets filled the room as the girls began shifting into comfortable sleeping positions. Kennedy went right along with them, but she couldn't quite let go of the unease that coiled in the pit of her stomach, so she slipped a hand under her pillow and curled it around the stake she kept there. Thera had enchanted it for her graduation gift, infusing it with a complex spell designed to thwart vampire thrall and other low-level compulsions, and maybe, if she was lucky, it would keep her from going completely under now. She had the feeling that she really should be awake for whatever happened next.

The level of noise dropped again, until the silence was broken only by the susurrus of breathing and the sniffling of one of the littlest girls. Kennedy kept clutching her stake, waiting on edge for the woman with the microphone to begin putting them to sleep, but the quiet kept holding until she was ready to bolt up into a sitting position again and demand to know what the problem was. Then, finally, someone spoke.

"The charm has taken effect," a male voice said, barely audible without the microphone's aid. "You may begin."

"Very well," the mystery woman murmured, in a husky, tired voice. She sounded as though she had the entire weight of the world on her shoulders, and it leant a grim, solemn air to the rhythmic foreign words that followed. Kennedy didn't recognize the language, but it sounded old and non-European, and the amplification of the speaker system made it echo strangely in the large, open room.

An electric feeling began to build up in the air as each phrase rolled off the woman's tongue. Kennedy realized abruptly that the others must all be out already-- whatever 'charm' had put them asleep had done a quick and quiet job of it. They could never have all stayed quiet through this. It felt like the calm between a lightning strike and the thunderclap that followed, when the back of your eyelids burned with the afterimage and the scent of ozone was sharp in the air, and you were bracing for the big noise that was going to come rumbling down over your head.

Then the spell came to a close. And... nothing happened. Kennedy tensed her grip on the stake even further, feeling the carved crosses on the handle press into her sweaty palm, and tried to keep her breathing quiet, but the strange charge in the room didn't release, or explode, or anything. It just quietly dissipated, until the only thing noticeably out of place was the racing of her heart.

"Ah... Lydia?" The man in the suit spoke up again, sounding more than a little perturbed.

"I read the spell as written, sir," the woman-- Lydia-- answered wearily. "Every word."

"And yet nothing happened," came the clipped reply, in acid, condemning tones.

"I read it correctly, sir," Lydia replied, with a little more confidence. "The fact that there was no result simply means that there is no Slayer here."

"That is not _possible_!" he declared, loudly.

Kennedy couldn't keep her eyes shut any longer. She peered out through her eyelashes, trying to keep still so that no one would notice, but she had to see what was going on. The view didn't disappoint. Lydia, hair still all askew and glasses slipping on her nose, stood resolutely in front of the senior Watcher, who was gesturing vehemently with his hands. A vein bulged in his forehead, and his face was turning very red; it totally compromised the distinguished salt-and-pepper look he'd had going earlier.

"We have _every single_ Potential Slayer in this room!" he continued, heedless of the interested attention of the junior Watchers still standing near the exits. "And Faith is dead! There has to be a new Slayer. That was the whole point of this exercise! You must have done something wrong!"

"No," Lydia said, and then suddenly smiled. "No, I didn't," she repeated, in tones of growing wonder. "She said something about trusting the Powers..."

"Bugger the Powers!" Mr. Wyndam-Price yelled, then turned on his heel and strode toward the doors. "Smythe! Gorton! I want an update on the Summers' girl's team, and Percy, find out where my son is!" The doors slammed shut behind him, and his voice dwindled as he stormed away from the room.

"Holy shit," Kennedy whispered, pressing her face into her pillow to muffle the words. She had no idea how to process what had just happened here.

From the sound of the hysterical laughter coming from the front of the room, Lydia had no idea, either.

--


	16. Arresting Developments: Xander

**Chapter Fifteen: Arresting Developments**

SATURDAY, JUNE 8, 2002, 4:53 PM (GMT)  
LONDON

--

"Buffy. Buffy!" Xander hissed, trying to catch the blonde Slayer's attention without disturbing everyone else in the hotel's lobby. Especially the staff, whose attention they really _didn't_ need focused on them right now. "Buffy, wait up!"

She either didn't hear him, or didn't want to, and stormed right out through the hotel's front doors, her small frame radiating tension and fury. Xander didn't really blame her; they had come to a foreign country trying to rescue a sister Slayer from men who should have been their allies, and far from making progress, had somehow managed to lose two more people to that same enemy. And now, this latest blow-- Cordelia had called from the car rental agency where she and Giles had gone to pick up a pair of vans with the unhelpful news that Giles had been arrested right in front of her.

Xander picked up the pace and hurried after her. Righteously upset or not, it was definitely not a good idea for Buffy to be loose on the streets in that mood. They had plans to make and things to do if they were going to have any chance of getting away before someone managed to connect Giles back to the hotel and come after _them_, and the clock was still ticking on their other lost friends. Scouring the streets for Slayage action in the middle of sunlit London was not what Giles would have called a constructive use of their time.

"Buffy!" He called her name again as he pushed through the glass doors, searching for a glimpse of her among the pedestrians outside. She might be able to outrun a gazelle on a good day, but on a busy sidewalk crowded with people carrying briefcases and shopping bags she wouldn't have gotten far. Unfortunately, she was also just a little on the short side, and her wavy blonde hair and cream blouse might as well have been camouflage.

Dawn was right on his heels, and she latched onto his arm as soon as he paused to crane his neck for a better look. It was a good thing he was still carrying the Orbs, or she might have left bruises; she'd only been at Slayer strength for a week and a half, and tended to forget the damage she could do in moments of stress.

"Do you see her? Xander, where'd she go?" Her voice was strained with worry, and he could smell the fear and anger on her, nearly as strong as they'd been on Buffy.

Smell. Duh! Xander smacked his forehead with the hand Dawn wasn't busy mangling, and turned his attention on the riot of scents clouding the air around them. He hadn't been paying much attention to the details his enhanced senses picked up in the busy city, as it was easy to get overwhelmed, but they were there all the same. A few quick breaths picked up the usual dirt, gasoline, pollution, body odor, perfume, and other scents left behind by the travelers all around them, but the traces of two Slayers stood out strongly over all of it: Dawn, standing at his side, and a fading trail that struck out leftward from where he stood.

"She went that way," he said, pointing in the direction Buffy had gone.

Dawn turned in that direction, frantically scanning the sidewalk for her sister, then took a step forward, still gripping Xander's arm for all she was worth. "We have to go after her," she said, breathing hard from the stress and adrenaline.

"No, _I'll_ go after her," he told her, bracing his feet to keep from being dragged along in her wake. "Dawn, you heard her-- they arrested Giles more than fifteen minutes ago now, and it won't take them very long to track him back to the rest of us. You have to go back in there and get everybody packing."

"Me?" She gaped at him, dismayed. "Why me? Willow--"

--can keep you safer in there than you will be out here, Xander thought, but held his tongue. So far, everyone that had been taken had either Watcher breeding or Slayer power or both, except for Anya, who had tried to reach Faith and just never came back. Letting both Summers Slayers wander around on the streets of London was asking for trouble, especially if someone had added their pictures to the ones of Giles that had apparently been distributed to the authorities. If the Watchers' Council had enough clout to get Giles arrested on a murder charge for a death that had been ruled accidental decades ago, who knew what they might dredge up to use against the other Scoobies?

He shook his head. "Willow is probably still stressing out, because she has no idea where to go or what to do next. Neither do I, but I do know we can't just wait for Travers' goons to find us." A thought occurred to him, and he fished his wallet out of his pocket, digging for his keycard. "Get mine and Giles' stuff too. As soon as I find Buffy, we'll move; as soon as we're safe, we can worry about the plan-making."

"But I don't... what if she..." Dawn stared at him a moment longer, drawing deep breaths, then glanced down the street where Buffy had disappeared and bit her lip. "Okay. You have your phone too, right? Don't you _dare_ come back without her."

Xander pried her hand carefully off his arm and gave it a gentle squeeze. "I promise. Now go back inside, we're blocking traffic."

She let the Resolve face go, and for a moment looked lost and far older than her fifteen years. Then she jerked her head in a quick nod, took the keycard from his hand, and hurried back through the hotel doors.

Xander scrubbed a hand through his hair and took another deep breath, ignoring the curious frowns their little conversation had attracted from some of the passersby. Then he set off after the slowly fading traces of his friend. He had a feeling Buffy hadn't gone far.

* * *

He caught up with her half a dozen blocks away, in a pocket of greenery next to the sidewalk set with an elaborately carved stone bench. She was poised on the edge of it, knees together, back straight, hands clasped in her lap like some perfect model of female decorum. He slowed as he got within a few yards of her, knowing her Slayer sense would pick up the presence of the Orbs, and approached with cautious steps.

"Hey, Buff."

She looked up at him warily, then let her mouth slide into an embarrassed half-frown and looked down at her hands again. Xander was close enough now that he could see Mr. Pointy clasped between them.

"This place is a lot bigger than Sunnydale, isn't it?" Buffy said, hesitantly, still studying her favorite stake. "I mean, duh. I lived in L.A., I should know this, but I still went storming off like I could _do_ something about it by myself. Beat up a bartender. Thrash a few demons. I don't know. Something. But..." She looked up at him again with tears standing in the corners of her hazel-green eyes, and took a deep breath, struggling to keep calm. "I don't fight humans, Xander. I'm really, really bad at it. Do you know how many months it took for us to stop the Nerd Squad? Not to mention the joy that was Evil Faith. And the only times I've gone up against Council goons before, it's just been a few, and they were on _my_ turf. Giles was in charge of this, and they've taken him away... I don't know what to do."

Xander took the last few steps slowly, then lowered himself onto the bench next to her and clasped his empty hands together, stooping his back a little so that their shoulders were level. "Well," he said, drawing the word out. He'd had a chance to think a little as he ran, and saw only one real course of action open to them. "It occurs to me that the G-Man, being all Magified these days, is pretty darned likely to break his own self out of prison, and if he's anyplace he can't there's no way we'll be able to do anything about it without more resources. Like you said, this isn't our turf. But if we catch up with Wes and Ethan..."

Buffy sniffled a little. "You're telling me we should just _leave_ him?"

"Not _leave_, leave him," he said. "More like a strategic withdrawal. Look, we don't even know where they took him, and if we try to find out we'll make targets of ourselves. On the other hand, we _do_ know where to pick up Wes' trail..."

"And even if he's not there," Buffy nodded, perking up a little as she picked up his train of thought, "something has to be. He wouldn't have gone there if he didn't think it would help him find Faith."

"Right," he agreed, nudging her shoulders with his. "So we pack up, find a new car rental place, and make tracks. Or find tracks. Whichever."

"Listen to you, getting all Voice of Reason on me." Buffy threw a watery smile in his direction. "With the actual making of sense."

"Yeah, well," Xander shrugged, keeping his tone light. "Grew up, remember?"

Buffy's smile slipped at that remark, and she gave him a searching look. "Yeah. Yeah, I do remember. How _are_ things with Anya, by the way?"

Xander blinked at the rather sudden change in topic, and gave his watch a surreptitious glance. It had been nearly twenty minutes since he left Dawn at the hotel. "Ah, we really should be getting back..."

"No." She shook her head, then took a hand off of Mr. Pointy and reached over to cover the face of his watch. "I need another few minutes out here for my nerves to settle, or I won't be good for anything. You have time to spill. Anya's been way anti-Xander this week, and that usually only happens when she's upset or in denial about something."

"Ask a hard question, why don't you?" he teased, then seriously tried to formulate an answer. He thought he knew what the problem was; he'd had a kind-of sort-of coffee date with Anya to try and establish some kind of framework for relating to each other past the wreck of their near-wedding, but he wasn't sure how _he_ felt about it yet, much less what Anya was thinking.

"I dunno, Buff," he said, after a moment. "I've never really stopped loving her, but when that demon showed up at our wedding, it was like all my doubts came crashing down at once. I wasn't ready to get married. I wasn't putting her first in my life, and I'm not even sure I can. That's not fair to her, you know? And now that she's doing the vengeance thing again..." He let the sentence die, and sighed. "We went out for coffee and tried to talk about things, but I'm not sure either of us really understands each other's priorities."

"I know how that goes," Buffy said, quietly. "I know you don't really want to hear about it, but that's mostly why I ended my relationship with Spike. It wasn't fair to him-- _I_ wasn't fair to him-- but he didn't understand my priorities, either."

Xander winced at that. It still stung that she'd reached out to a soulless vampire in the early days after her resurrection instead of confronting the Scoobies with the truth, but he could understand it a little better these days. "It's not that I hate him, you know," he said. "Even if I kind of do. It's just that no matter how helpful he is, he's not going to spontaneously grow a soul, and sooner or later the chip is going to fail. It's been in his best interests to stay good up 'til now, but when he gets the chance to be bad again..." He shrugged. "I worry."

"He won't take that chance," Buffy said, in a firm, quiet voice. "He's done so much the last couple of years, cared so much, I can't believe he'd turn on us now even without a conscience. But I didn't bring him up so we could argue about that again." She paused, threading her fingers together nervously, then gave him a sad look. "It's just, back before the sexcapades started, when I didn't feel like I belonged anywhere, we used to just hang out. No funny stuff, just talking and being in each other's company. I really, really miss that now, but I don't think we can get it back, not after everything we did to each other."

Xander swallowed back what he wanted to say, and gave her a little one-armed hug instead. This was time to be Supporto-Guy, not Mr. Intervention. "And I know how that goes. Missing the friend part of it, too, I mean. Nothing against you and Wills, but I planned on spending the rest of my life with her, you know?" He planted a brotherly kiss on the top of her head, then let go of her and tried to lighten the mood a bit. "So. Are we pathetic, or is it just me? I think this calls for an angst-movie marathon as soon as we get back."

"I'm cool with that," she replied, giving him a faint smile. "Just so long as I get dibs on the cookie-dough fudge mint chip."

"Deal," he agreed.

Buffy nodded, then braced her hands on her knees, preparing to push to her feet. "I think I'm ready now. We really _should_ be getting..." Her voice trailed off, and every line of her face went tense again. "Xander," she said, in a soft, warning tone. "Someone's cast a spell, and I think..."

As she spoke, the smell of ozone began to sharpen the air around her, very pungent to Xander's sensitive nose. It wasn't exactly a new scent, either; he realized he'd been picking up slight traces of it during their conversation, but it had suddenly gotten a lot stronger. "Buffy?" He gripped her upper arms, turning her toward him, and was disturbed to see her eyes suddenly roll back into her head. Almost instantaneously, a great flash of electricity zapped his palms, throwing him away from her and off of the bench with considerable force.

"Buffy, are you okay?" He picked himself up off the pavement, absentmindedly brushing a hand over his black jeans to check for tears or abrasions, and silently gave thanks once again for the invulnerability provided by the Orbs of Nezzla'khan. Buffy was still seated on the bench, but she had hunched forward, bracing her elbows on her brown leather clad thighs, palms covering her face.

"Just peachy," she answered him, in a quiet, raspy voice. "That was-- I saw Dawn, back at the hotel, packing my clothes. I saw Wes running; he looked like he'd been through a war, but he was outside somewhere, he'd gotten away from that place we saw on the video. And then I saw Faith..."

Buffy took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. "Faith looked dead, Xander. Blue lips, pale skin. But she didn't _feel_ dead to me. This... I think whoever cast that was trying to find something, someone. A Slayer. And I saw them all-- me, Dawn, Faith, and whatever the hell Wesley is. No others. Whatever they were trying, it didn't work the way they thought it would."

Xander stared at her a moment, processing that, and tried not to think about the fact that she hadn't mentioned Anya's name during her little recitation. "So we still have a chance at getting them back," he said, matter-of-factly.

"I... I think so. It was like a Slayer Dream," Buffy said quietly, then suddenly lurched to her feet. "Dawn! She probably felt that too, and she doesn't have any experience with this, she's going to freak."

Xander felt a wave of deja vu sweep over him as he watched her take off through the crowd, once again completely ignoring his presence. At least she was running in the right direction this time, though, and he'd managed to cheer her up a little. In the disaster of a week they were having, that at least had to count for something.

--

**Author's Note:** _For those re-reading, this is the only re-posted chapter whose plot differs significantly from the original._

--


	17. Internal Politics: Gavin

**Chapter Sixteen: Internal Politics**

SATURDAY, JUNE 8, 2002, 9:46 AM PST (5:46 PM GMT)  
LOS ANGELES

--

"Wolfram and Hart, Special Projects, Gavin Park speaking."

Gavin answered the phone that way out of habit, some part of him still in mourning for the big office, the expensive suits, and the power that went with the title. It wasn't entirely false, of course; he was still on retainer for the firm, although these days he fell more into the category of a paid informant for the New Orleans division. Why the Senior Partners didn't just order the Los Angeles branch rebuilt, he didn't know-- although he suspected internal politics-- but they seemed content to pay one of LA's two Special Projects survivors to spy upon the other, and until today he had been quite satisfied with that role.

"Gavin, you little bastard, what are you up to?"

The voice on the other end of the line was moderately calm, but Gavin could almost taste the tightly-suppressed anger that hovered just beneath the surface. He let his mouth stretch wide in a grin that he knew his caller would hear, if not see, and reached for the button that would turn on the recording device.

"Lilah. I was just thinking of you," he said brightly, glancing across the surface of the desk at his open laptop, which displayed a stilled image of her face. This morning's batch of video surveillance files had been _very_ enlightening, and more than a little entertaining. "I just had the most interesting chat with Colonel McNamara."

"You're supposed to be dead," Lilah hissed, and he could just picture those dark eyes of hers flashing with fury. No denials, no accusations; it was as good as an admission that he already had her outmaneuvered. The feeling of triumph that gave him was nearly as potent as the dark joy of Billy's touch, still fresh in his memory; cleaner, perhaps, without the irrational rage and misogynistic violence, but the idea of putting Lilah in her place still made some primitive part of him thrum with satisfaction.

"Surprise, surprise," Gavin replied, glancing down at the fading rope scars on his wrists. "I would say the same thing about you, but I don't think I could manage the same level of outrage; I've had a few weeks to get used to the idea." Once he'd gotten over the shock and indignity of being bound half-naked in the Los Angeles sewers, showered with the dust of a former client, then put out of a job by Linwood's flawed machinations, the first thing he'd done had been to look for other cockroaches who might have survived their pocket apocalypse. He'd expected Lilah to be one of them, and he hadn't been disappointed.

"You had my apartment bugged, didn't you?" she spat back, and he could hear the determined click of heels on tile as she paced around with her phone. Kitchen, by the sound of it. She'd never find the camera in there by sight; it was wedged into the workings of her expensive coffee machine, where a searching eye would glide over the chrome fittings without pausing to examine every crevice. "I'm going to have the apartment swept, and you are going to send me the information you got from McNamara, and you are going to _keep_ out of my business, and then _maybe_ I won't have you killed."

"All that cash you came up with this morning would go a long way toward making sure of that, wouldn't it?" Gavin reached for the laptop, tapped in a few commands, then wound the morning's footage back a few hours. "Hmm. Seven million, four hundred thousand, wasn't it? You certainly counted it enough times. I hope you're aware, however, that none of that money is yours to spend?"

He had a fairly good idea where the money had come from-- the only outstanding contract in the seven-figure range in Special Projects when the firm collapsed had been the one regarding Faith Wilkins, wanted alive, cash payable on delivery. It would be interesting to find out just how Lilah had subdued the brunette Slayer, but at that moment that aspect of the problem was peripheral to his concerns.

"What do you mean, it's not mine to spend?" Lilah spluttered, indignantly. "I fulfilled the contract, I _earned_ it, and there's sure as Hell not an office here for me to sign it over to anymore. Until the Senior Partners rebuild it or send someone to tell me otherwise..."

"Consider yourself told," Gavin cut her off, smirking at the perfect lead-in she'd given him. "Mesektet has yet to be heard from, but in her absence Master Tarfall has made a few suggestions regarding the disposition of remaining Los Angeles branch assets, which include all outstanding cases, contracts, and projects that predate the destruction of the office, along with any resultant proceeds."

"Master Tarfall?" Lilah demanded. "You contacted New Orleans? Just how stupid are you? Did you even read the fine print in your contract?" She made a noise of disgust, then abruptly changed the subject. "And even if it's true, that doesn't explain the little stunt you just pulled with the Initiative. The deal I made with Sahjahn was _mine_, and our association was never down on paper at Wolfram & Hart to begin with. He won't negotiate with you, and any opportunity I might have brought to the firm because of the information he would have given me is going to be wasted because of your stupidity."

Gavin shook his head and hit a few more keys on the keyboard of his laptop, pulling up the information the Colonel's assistant had sent over from their Hostile 17 file. It was voluminous, very detailed, and worth far more in his opinion than any name that might be supplied by an incorporeal, unpredictable demon. Connor would surface sooner or later, betrayed by his very uniqueness, and in the meantime the child's uncle-- nephew?-- could be put to all sorts of entertaining and beneficial uses.

"Let it die," Gavin replied. "There are other ways to find Connor, and far better ways to use a leashed vampire than to turn him loose to kill indiscriminately. You might want to thank Sahjahn for reminding me Spike existed, though; I wasn't in Special Projects the last time he was in town, and I hadn't kept up with the details of his file."

"And just what do you plan to do with him?" Lilah demanded.

"Ah ah, what kind of opponent would I be if I told you everything I was planning?" Gavin teased her. "Oh wait-- that's _your_ strategy. Suffice it to say, he's about to be involved in a rather delicate operation overseas, and a little... selective programming might turn the outcome decidedly in our favor."

"In favor of New Orleans, you mean," Lilah growled irritably. "You know very well that the prophecies state..."

"A lot of things that won't ever happen," Gavin broke in, "if Mesektet remains among the missing, and if she doesn't, well, whatever happens is between her and Master Tarfall. If I were you, I'd be more worried about the fact that you're going the way of Lindsey, and they aren't very accepting of that in their oath-bound employees."

"I am _nothing_ like Lindsey," she hissed in reply, and Gavin thought for a minute she would hang up out of spite. Of course, she didn't-- she hadn't gotten the answers she wanted-- but he could almost hear her teeth grinding in frustration.

It was more true than she wanted to admit, and both of them knew it; no matter what loyalty she thought she was exercising, the fact remained that she was expressing loyalty in the first place, and while that was a worrisome but acceptable positive impulse in general for W&H employees it was a warning sign when other do-gooding impulses accompanied it. He could still remember her verbal scramble to cover herself after she had instinctively objected to their plans for Darla's baby.

"Prove it," he challenged her. "Go to New Orleans. Hand over the fee. Let go of this obsession you have with Angel and his kid. The firm will set you up with a job and an apartment just like the ones you left behind, and it'll be like none of this ever happened."

"And leave everything to you?" Lilah hissed. "You have no idea how to handle these people. Code violations on the hotel, for fuck's sake! You're going to screw everything up again, and this time I'm not going to clean up after you."

"I assure you, that won't be necessary," Gavin said crisply, and hung up on her.

When they rebuilt the firm, he made a mental note, there would be no more bright young lawyers plucked straight from law school to serve Special Projects. That entire class of charmingly initialed inductees-- Lilah Morgan, Lindsey McDonald, and Lee Martin-- had been rather ambivalently evil as a whole, and incapable of the detachment required to handle the department's work load. Gavin, by way of contrast, had put in several years in the Real Estate department first, and found the experience very helpful in his new role. Not only had he mastered the condescending attitude so necessary when dealing with lesser beings, he had acquired a really productive set of resources to draw from. Who would ever have imagined, for example, that the firm's transaction records for a certain secret army base would contribute so much value to later negotiations?

The Colonel's secretary-- aide? What did they call them in the military, anyway?-- had stonewalled him at first, but the mention of a "certain subterranean property in Sunnydale, California," had managed to get him through that initial roadblock. That benighted one-Starbucks town was as sensitive to the reformed Initiative as Los Angeles was to the rest of Wolfram & Hart.

"Note to self," Gavin mused, and reached for a legal pad. It would be interesting to find out if McNamara was aware of the Hellmouth's new status; they could hide a much larger operation in a city this size than in a burg like the Slayer's home town. Future negotiation potential, there.

He tapped the ballpoint pen across his knuckles for a moment, considering whether he might have missed any other opportunities in the conversation, then keyed a few more commands into his laptop to bring up the audio file.

--

_"McNamara," the Colonel's voice announced in a curt, gruff tone._

_The Gavin in the recording took a deep breath and confidently began his appeal. "Sir, my name is Gavin Park. I'm an attorney with Wolfram & Hart..."_

_McNamara cut him off impatiently. "I've already heard from you people once this morning, and I'll tell you what I told Ms. Morgan; the U.S. government is not interested in providing that kind of proprietary information to a civilian law firm."_

_"Sir, you misunderstand me," Gavin replied, closing in for the kill. "The Hostile 17 project is not within my purview. My concern is the property that we assisted you in procuring beneath the UCSD campus. According to our records, you reported a large-scale fire and destruction of all contents in May of 2000?"_

_The Colonel hesitated before replying, and when he did, he sounded much warier. "Yes. We were forced to close operations and report the facility as a total loss, but all the property loans you assisted us with had been paid off by then. I don't see what there is to be concerned about."_

_"Insurance fraud, sir," Gavin said crisply. He'd arranged for an investigation after the last of the soldiers, one Riley Finn, finally packed up and left the town behind; just a precaution, but it had come in very handy today. "The Initiative claimed several million dollars' worth of destroyed equipment and other property that has been observed to still exist, not to mention a rather unique selection of quote, laboratory animals for whom no purchase records were ever filed."_

_There was silence on the other end of the line, followed by a muffled curse and the shuffling of paper. After a moment's pause, McNamara cleared his throat and took a deep breath. "I am a reasonable man, Mr. Park. Should I happen to somehow lose a copy of the Hostile 17 data, might I count on the reciprocal disappearance of this line of questioning?"_

_"Consider it disappeared, sir," Gavin announced. "And might I suggest that the following fax number is a useful place to lose information?"_

--

Gavin stopped the recording before the copy of his voice could list off the ten digits of his modem line, and considered the situation with a smug grin. Lilah stymied: check. Valuable resource acquired: check. Possible source of additional 'lost information' in future: check. The continued esteem of his current boss: assured.

This was shaping up to be a very good day.

--

**Author's Note:** _For those quirking their eyebrows about Mesektet and Master Tarfall, neither is my creation. Mesektet is the infamous little girl in the White Room, the Senior Partner's conduit prior to the destruction of W&H, and member of the Ra'Tet (see the Beast-arc in S4 for details). Master Tarfall was an SP mentioned once in 3.08 "Quickening" and never followed up on, so I'm twisting him to serve my own purposes._

--


	18. Unpleasant Surprises: Travers

**Chapter Seventeen: Unpleasant Surprises**

SATURDAY, JUNE 8, 2002, 6:01 PM (GMT)  
A SECURE LOCATION

--

Quentin Travers shuddered as he crossed the verge of the null field and stepped into the facility's secured guest quarters. All of the old Council bloodlines had been heavily bred for power and intelligence in ages past, and though few today exhibited the kind of power Rupert Giles had once had at his command, no Watcher grew to adulthood without becoming accustomed to the feel of magic as a constant background presence in their lives. To have it suddenly ripped away from one's being was akin to having a portion of one's body go unexpectedly numb; it felt to Travers as though his ears and skin had suddenly been wrapped in cotton wool.

He scowled through the sensation and strode forward to the bed, staring down at the corpse of the girl that had given the Watchers' Council so much trouble in recent years. From the moment she'd turned up in Sunnydale and the Council had become aware she had not fallen to Kakistos alongside her first Watcher, she had been nothing but a thorn in their side. At first, she'd bid fair to follow in Summers' rebellious footsteps; that level of notoriety had evidently not been enough for the dark Slayer, however, and she'd soon turned coat and made alliance with the enemy. Travers had hoped she'd perish in hospital after that unfortunate series of events had finally concluded, but she had escaped that fate... and then escaped the hands of the Council once more when she fled to the cursed vampire for sanctuary.

Even incarcerated, Faith could have been of use to the Council, but several members of the Board had put a stop to Travers' plans for her, refusing to recognize the necessity of the measures he intended. And so she had remained out of reach whilst their hold on Sunnydale had weakened further and the situation with young Wyndam-Price slipped entirely out of control. Not until the boy's origins had been laid bare at last had Travers found the leverage he needed to arrange matters as he wished. Richard had been willing to go to extraordinary lengths to keep the knowledge of the boy's exact origins limited to himself and Travers.

It seemed terribly fitting that in the end, it had been Faith's own failures that finally brought her back to them. The lawyer Faith had dealt with in her headlong flight after awakening from the coma, and whom she had made an enemy of all on her own, had taken the Council's bait, engineering the Slayer's capture and turning her over for a tidy sum. With Cruciamentum drugs at hand, a null field in place suppressing whatever abilities might have escaped the medication, and hostages to her supposedly rehabilitated conscience in the form of the Potential Slayers, it had seemed impossible for her to find any further way to thwart them. Even the cup of poison, intended as a psychological measure only, should have played to the Council's benefit if she had succumbed.

_If_. Travers shook his head. There was no uncertainty about it: the emptied goblet had fallen from her hand to lay sideways on the carpet, only a few deadly drops still clinging to its interior. A dark stain had gathered in the corners of her mouth, and all color had fled from her limp, indecently bared flesh. In addition, the body had been checked manually-- and quite thoroughly-- by the facility's medical staff to make certain that the stain around the girl's lips was indeed the poison and that she hadn't withdrawn into some sort of low-functioning meditative trance. It was, and she hadn't. Her heart had stopped within seconds of ingesting the drink, and she had not moved since.

Had they made a mistake, renewing the null field around her room after they had adjusted the spell to exclude the Potential Slayers' dormitory? Had the Slayer essence somehow been imprisoned within the walls of this bedroom? Travers glanced around uneasily at that thought, all too aware of the origins of that subsentient, migratory spirit. The echo of Sineya would not be pleased with the presence of a descendant of the Shadow Men.

"Chalmers," he snapped, looking up from the body to fix his gaze on the incompetent woman who had been responsible for reading the spell in the Potentials' quarters.

She started a little, like a frightened rabbit, at his voice; he fought the urge to sneer at her. "Please inform Richard that the null field is no longer necessary. She cannot escape now, and its suppressant effects may be at fault for the delay in the Slayer transference."

The mousy woman ducked her head in acknowledgement, then fled out into the corridor. Travers sniffed in disapproval, then paced slowly around the edge of the bed. He had seen many deaths in his day, including his own Slayer after the failure of her Cruciamentum. There was nothing particularly special about this one, save for the particular benefits Travers would garner from the power that should have been-- and would still be-- released by her demise.

He paused by the head of the bed, studying the slackened lines of the Slayer's face, then let his eyes trail downward to the silver flash of the chi-rho necklace at her throat. An unusual choice for a Slayer, that; most Slayers were aware of the efficacy of crosses and holy water against vampires and certain other demons, but few ever thought to try other types of Christian paraphernalia or religious items from other cultures, and the Council did not encourage the practice. The exact function of the divine in her duties was not something such a short-lived foot soldier really needed to concern herself with.

Perhaps the necklace had served another purpose? The researchers had not yet proved to Travers' satisfaction whether static, persistent enchantments adhering to objects remained active within the null field's range. Curious, Travers took a step closer, extending one hand toward the bright, reflective metal.

He was arrested short of his goal by the peculiar sensation of a warm obstacle pressing against his left shin. A squeak emitted from the obstacle when he attempted to shift it with that foot, and Travers' tenuous hold on his temper slipped free. "Chalmers! Percy!" he roared, absolutely furious, and took three quick steps away from the bed. How could they have let such a thing pass?

The bed skirt moved, then lifted to expose the lithe body of a young blonde woman little older than the dead Slayer squeezing back out from the space under the bed. An irritatingly _familiar_ woman, whom he had last seen at the side of the Summers Slayer the year before. "You!" he spat, pulse throbbing at his temple in rage.

She staggered to her feet with something approximating a contrite expression on her face. "Oops?" she offered, smiling at him apologetically.

"Percy!" he yelled again, then glared as the door finally opened, disgorging the bookish young Watcher.

"Uh, s-sir?" he stammered, glancing in Travers' direction, then turned his focus back to the inexplicable Ms. Jenkins.

"How did she get in here?" Travers demanded of him. When the dark Slayer had been installed, the room had been empty and the door locked; Richard himself had been here at the time, and whatever personal disagreements might lie between them, Travers trusted the other man's dedication to his duty. Someone _must_ have admitted Ms. Jenkins to the room in the hours since.

"I, um, I--" Percy trailed off without even offering a complete sentence, his eyes fixated somewhere near the young woman's bustline.

"It's really rather simple," the blonde replied, her hands clasped in front of her. She appeared disconcertingly unconcerned about her current situation.

Travers narrowed his eyes at her, nostrils flaring, before responding. "Do explain," he said, forcing the words out through clenched teeth.

"It went something--" she said, then smiled and paused for a second as the air around them briefly glittered, leaving in its wake the feeling of magic seeping back into his bones.

"--Like this," she continued, and her face shifted into something entirely unexpected.

Horrified, Travers staggered backward again, belatedly equating her appearance in Sunnydale over two years ago with the reports of Anyanka the Vengeance Demon disappearing in that town. He flinched as his back made contact with the wall, then raised his arms in front of him, bracing for whatever curse she had come to inflict-- then blinked as she abruptly disappeared from the room.

_The Potentials!_ he thought with a stab of dismay, then forced himself to relax as he remembered that they were currently all entrapped in spell-induced slumber. He would have to take care to raise the null field again before allowing them to be awakened, but in the meantime, with Faith Lehane no longer among the living, he was probably safe from Anyanka's wrath. Whether the Slayer had simply failed to make a wish, or Anyanka's ability to enforce wishes perished upon the petitioner's death, he did not know, and did not care; clearly, the Powers That Be were on his side in this matter.

Travers straightened his collar and stepped away from the wall, then turned the full force of his attention back on the hapless Percy. "We shall discuss this failure later," he said, scowling at the young man. "Return to the dormitory at once and assist Chalmers in re-casting the revelatory spell."

"At once, sir," Percy agreed hurriedly, then fled from the room.

Travers snorted at the boy's nervous haste, then shook his head and and turned back to the body. Before Anyanka had interrupted him, he had been examining Faith's necklace; it still seemed a likely receptacle for defensive charm-work, especially if it were genuinely made from silver and not a more fashionable option such as white gold or platinum. He stepped back toward the bed-- briefly pausing to drop to one knee and peer beneath it to make certain there were no more intruders-- then gently applied the index and middle fingers of his right hand to the chi-rho pendant.

Power flowed up Travers' arm at the contact. He jerked his hand free immediately, startled by the hybrid flavour of the magic contained within, and swore under his breath at the implications. If the null field was, indeed, calibrated specifically to suppress supernatural emanations from biological organisms, sparing pre-set spells entirely, it now meant a possible additional layer of interference in the passing of the torch in question.

Unless he missed his guess, the vampire's son had been responsible for the pendant's enchantment, and the boy's spell-casting seemed to have improved greatly since his Academy days. It would take a team of experts to determine its exact functionality, and the examination would have to be done before the body was disposed of; Travers wanted no unpleasant surprises later on. Especially if Percy's errand failed as entirely as the earlier attempt to discover the next Slayer had done.

Regardless of the delay, however, it was only a matter of time before Travers had everything he wanted in his grasp. The Rollright installation had reported the capture of the chaos mage, Ethan Rayne, and the London branch had successfully engineered the arrest of Rupert Giles, who had been spotted in the city mere hours ago. A team was in hot pursuit of the rash young Wyndam-Price, and the only other British member of the so-called "Scooby Gang", the vampire known as William the Bloody, was the current subject of a great deal of plotting on American soil. That left the remainder of the group without leadership or native knowledge of the terrain, virtually guaranteeing that Summers and her crew would not be able to interrupt his plans until it was far too late.

Travers favored the Slayer's body with one last smile of satisfaction, then turned on his heel and left the room.

--

**Author's Note:** _You're not seeing things; this is, indeed, the first new chapter after a two-year hiatus. Stay tuned!_

--


	19. Cross Country: Dawn

**Chapter Eighteen: Cross Country**

SATURDAY, JUNE 8, 2002, 6:47 PM (GMT)  
ON THE ROAD

--

Dawn huddled further down in the corner between the van's bench seat and the windows, rubbing her hands up and down her arms. She was still tired from the plane trip, but after the day they'd been having she was still too wired to go back to sleep.

The countryside they were passing through was mostly green and pretty, but it was definitely on the wet and chilly side, at least compared to California. She wasn't going to get to see much more of it, either; the sun was only an hour or so above the horizon, and the moon had already come and gone for the day. Dawn had no real idea of the times or distances between London and the place they were going, but she figured they probably wouldn't even have got to the Stone thingies before night fell, which meant a lot of sneaking around in the dark and even less sleep after. Cordy had said there was some kind of inn two miles from the site, one with "Cross" in its name, but Dawn wasn't going to hold her breath that they'd actually get to stop there.

After the strange zappy vision thing that had happened back at the hotel, Buffy had been all nerves, wearing that impending-doom expression that usually meant "there's an apocalypse coming I'm not sure I can stop". The way Wes had looked in the vision, not to mention Faith, Dawn pretty much understood why, but that didn't make her feel any better about it. Nor did Buffy's fussing, projecting all her own worries on Dawn. The Prophecy might imply all four of them would get to live awhile longer, long enough to have some kind of effect on the balance at least, but Dawn knew as well as anyone there were more ways around Destiny than you could shake a stake at. Her whole existence pretty much proved it.

All in all, this was definitely not what she'd hoped for on her first trip overseas. In quiet moments after Buffy's return, when Dawn had allowed herself to daydream, she'd been thinking maybe Oxford for college if she got her grades up, maybe visiting some castles, maybe even a trip to Rome. This whole Slaying gig had put a major crimp in those plans. She was starting to get why Buffy had tried so hard to keep the Slaying thing from seeping into her regular life those first several years in Sunnydale; being normal might be seem kinda boring when you were the one watching your sister be a superhero, but you had no idea how good you really had it until it was taken from you.

Dawn shifted in her seat again, then stiffened as she realized her skin was starting to tingle in that falling-asleep kind of way. She hadn't thought anything of it at first when the same thing happened while she was packing Buffy's stuff, but that was before she'd scorched the clothes she was holding with an electrical discharge. "Buffy?" she asked, turning to the seat behind her to see if her sister was feeling the same thing.

Between the seven of them left at the hotel after Giles' arrest, only Cordy had had the ID and experience necessary to drive over here without getting the rest of them lost, wrecked, or dumped in jail, so she'd rented a large passenger van instead of the two smaller, more inconspicuous vehicles Giles had planned on getting. It was the kind of van Dawn was used to seeing driving around with church youth group logos stenciled on the sides; she'd never been in one, but she had a vague idea you were supposed to be twenty-five before you could drive one. She wasn't going to ask questions, though. With five other people scattered around England that they were hopefully going to start collecting any time now, it was the best option they had available.

Buffy had claimed the last bench seat for herself, the one behind Dawn, intent on catching a few more Z's before they had to leap into the fray. It wasn't even noon back in California yet, and it wasn't like they'd been doing much that would require rest since they'd got here, but Dawn was pretty sure that what Buffy was really hoping for was a Slayer Dream. They could sure use some guidance. Whether she was Dreaming or not, though, this was no time for her to be asleep.

"Buffy?" Dawn prompted her sister again, leaning further over the back of her own seat. "Buffy, wake up!"

"Mmm." Buffy groaned and stretched slowly, stifling a yawn behind one small hand. Then she sat up and blinked into Dawn's face. "What is it Dawnie?"

"I think it's happening again," Dawn said, urgently. "Whatever they did last time-- do you feel it?"

A small frown appeared between Buffy's brows as she studied her sister's face for a moment. Then she reached a hand up, tucking a long strand of Dawn's hair behind one ear.

"Buffy!" Dawn objected, half-embarrassed and half-frustrated. "Are you awake yet? That thing with the spell, where we saw Wes and Faith--"

The sleepy haze cleared from Buffy's eyes immediately. She turned both hands palm up in front of her, staring intently at them for a moment, then looked up urgently in the direction of the driver's seat. "Cordy, is there anywhere we can pull over? Now would be a really good time to not be touching metal!"

"What?" Cordy sounded startled. "What's going on?"

Buffy answered her quickly, in a frustrated tone. "I think the Watchers are trying to cast that spell..."

But it was too late. Dawn was vaguely aware of having a mini-seizure right there in her seat, her eyes rolling back as electricity flooded from every pore, but mostly she was caught up in the vision again, her consciousness split between four separate locations. She saw Buffy, beside her, going through the same vision-thing; Faith still lying on the strange bed where she'd been before, cold and blue around the edges, with someone tweedy standing over her; and Wesley, somewhere in the countryside, dropping to his knees as he looked down at some road or other...

Awareness of her surroundings returned to Dawn in a rush, cluttered up with the scent of ozone and the sound of half a dozen voices screaming all at once. Or maybe it was five voices and the squeal of tires leaving rubber on the road; inertia was slamming her forward against the seat belt, and she could hear things clattering to the floor all over the van. Cordy must have slammed on the brakes the instant it happened.

When the van finally screeched to a halt, Dawn jerked away from her grip on the seat and plastered herself up against the nearest window. In her vision of Wes, she'd seen a van skidding out of control on a country road just below him, a van that looked very much like the one they were traveling in. If he'd stayed on foot, running parallel to the roads and trusting in his Slayer-like speed to keep him ahead of pursuit, it was actually pretty possible-- and it would seriously be the best luck they'd had all day. Could they really have found him that easily?

"Is, is everyone okay?" she heard Tara ask in the background. "I diverted as much of the energy as I could, but I wasn't sure I got it all in time."

"Okay!" Cordelia shrieked. "We could have all gone in the ditch! What the hell is going on?"

"I am undamaged, Princess," Groo offered from the shotgun seat. "Your driving was most excellent."

"It was Watcher mojo," Xander spoke up next, answering Cordy's question. "Pretty much the same thing that happened earlier, except they zapped the van this time instead of just me."

"I don't think it did any damage..." Willow began, then trailed off. "Buffy, what are you... Buffy, are you okay?"

Dawn heard the van's passenger door open. She pulled herself away from the window long enough to see her sister disappear out onto the road, then run around the front of the van and out onto the grassy verge. It could only mean she'd seen it, too; and that meant Wes _had_ to be up there! Dawn struggled with her seatbelt buckle for a moment, then bolted out of the van after her.

The outside air was refreshing after being cooped up in the van, full of the clean scents of water, earth and grass, but the setting sun was in Dawn's eyes, making them water as she ran. She nearly tripped over Buffy when her sister stopped suddenly, dropping to her knees beside a hunched figure. The man was wearing jeans and a leather jacket over one of Wes' blue shirts, but his clothes were slashed in several places and he was covered with blood. Whatever had happened before he got away from the Watchers hadn't been fun for him.

"Wesley? Wes, c'mon, we've got to get moving," Buffy said urgently, touching his shoulder. "We can't afford to get caught out here... Wes! What's wrong?"

The ex-Watcher lifted his head, and Dawn shuddered at the grief and anger she could see in his expression. "Dumbass!" she hissed to Buffy. It should be obvious, even to her egocentric elder sister, what was wrong. "He saw everything we did!"

Buffy flinched but persevered. "She isn't dead, Wes. Didn't you say you gave her something? Something that would keep her safe if she ever got captured, at least until you came for her? I don't know what it was or what it was supposed to do, but I know it worked; Faith isn't dead, Wes. I could feel her in there. _I could feel her_."

"It wasn't meant to last this long!" he yelled back, finally responding. "A matter of hours, that was all the talisman was meant to hold her for! If I don't reach her before dawn tomorrow..."

"Then we'll find her tonight," Buffy said, her voice low and deadly. "You got what you went there for, right? That guy, he threw you something before your spell went wonky-- we saw it on the camera footage."

"Camera footage?" Wes gaped at her for a second, thrown by the reference, but he pressed one hand up against his jacket as if protecting something. "Y-yes," he said, looking a little less insane than he had a moment before. "Yes, I have it-- Cyril swore it contained the information I was looking for."

"And you trust this guy?" Dawn said, skeptically. "Isn't he the one who sprang the trap on you?"

Buffy threw her a glare at that, and Dawn winced. Yeah, the last thing they needed was a crazy Destroyer on their hands, and Buffy had almost had him calmed down. Fortunately, though, Wesley didn't react to her question; he was struggling to his feet already, one hand clasped around what looked like a computer CD case, his thoughts apparently miles away.

"Do you have a computer with you?" he asked absently.

Dawn glanced back toward the van. Cordy had apparently moved it to one side of the road so traffic could still get by, and the others were slowly swarming out of it, staring up after them. Willow was among them, busy talking to Tara about something, her red hair as vibrant as a flame in the setting sun's light.

"Of course," Buffy assured him. "Have you ever known Willow to go anywhere without her laptop? I'm sure she'd let you use it."

He relaxed just a little at her answer, and let her and Dawn latch onto his arms to help him down the hill. Dawn had no idea how he'd kept moving all this time, as battered up as he was; if this was as much as he'd healed in the three or four hours since the attack, she was amazed he'd made it out at all. He flinched a little when the others swarmed around him back at the van, and frowned when he realized Giles wasn't among them, but he seemed to accept the explanation for that without too much upset; he was too focused on the CD, and Faith's whereabouts, to care much.

When they'd first hooked up, Dawn had been flabbergasted at the very idea of them being together after all they'd put each other through. It hadn't been very long since he'd been the tweedy, nerdy, arrogant Watcher, and Faith had been a wicked, murderous ho. Dawn had come to realize, though, that both of them had the same intensity, deep down; she didn't understand a lot of it, but that didn't mean she couldn't see it. They challenged each other, and loved each other to the point of obsession.

And seriously, if she had to get kidnapped again someday? Dawn would hope her boyfriend would be half as dedicated to getting her back as Wesley was. It took him maybe ten minutes to figure out their next destination from the CD, and then they were off again, without so much as stopping to do more than patch him up with the first aid kit.

Maybe things were going to work out after all. Dawn settled back against the window in the van, staring out into the growing dusk, and allowed herself to hope.

--


	20. Change of State: Lilah

**Chapter Nineteen: Change of State**

SATURDAY, JUNE 8, 2002, 11:10 AM PST (7:10 PM GMT)  
LOS ANGELES

--

Lilah snapped her cell phone shut with a bitter, self-satisfied smile. She'd known from the beginning that getting the information she wanted out of McNamara would likely require multiple contacts and negotiation strategies, and Gavin had made the problem even thornier with his poisonous interference. But, like many others before him, he'd underestimated the strength of her conviction and her imagination; she _always_ found another way to move forward, no matter what was conjured up to slow her down.

The technological option would have been the easiest route to take, but she still had contacts in this city, and McNamara was hardly the only former member of the Initiative to remember the disposition of Hostile 17. Lilah'd had to talk fast to get Mrs. Finn to put her husband on the phone, and the young Captain hadn't been able to give her access to the exact schematics of the behavioral modification chip, but he _had_ remembered enough about its nature and construction for her to go ahead with Plan B. He'd had one of his own, if she remembered his file right, and must have looked up the details at least once after joining the majority of the Initiative survivors in their roving demon-hunting squad.

From the sound of things, a pretty rare combination of materials had gone into the chips' construction; Maggie Walsh had been aware of HSTs for some time before gaining approval for her little project, and she must have picked up enough experience with other aspects of the supernatural to run experiments with magic, too. That was the only explanation for some of the ingredients Finn had mentioned. Apparently, it took more than wires, plastic, and programming to affect a demon's basic impulses; it took compulsion spells and pain enchantments, too, worked right into the chip's physical make-up. Which meant that flipping switches might not have been enough to do the job, anyway, no matter what McNamara's records said.

Fortunately, Lilah's secondary solution had involved attacking the problem from a new angle altogether. She had called in one of her shrinking number of markers to acquire the services of a dark warlock-- not quite as powerful as Vail, who hadn't been seen or heard from since the local branch of the Firm was obliterated, but powerful enough to do the job-- and she'd sweetened the deal with some of the bounty the Council had paid her.

If Gavin really did report to Master Tarfall and had told the demon lord about her deal with the Watchers, then Lilah's grip on the money was tenuous anyway. Better to spend some of it now in pursuit of a goal that she could paint to the benefit of Wolfram & Hart, trumping Gavin's not-yet-implemented byzantine plans, than to lose it all anyway because a disaffected former co-worker had poisoned the Senior Partners against her. It was a risk, of course; if Spike did not act as she expected him to when his leash was removed, then no amount of plotting or groveling would restore her to favor. But if it did...

She glanced down at the designer watch clasping her wrist, and watched the sweep of the second hand as it inched toward the time the warlock had claimed he'd be done with his spellwork. Lilah hadn't had anything available with enough of an association with Spike for the man to use as a focus for his locating spells, but the information she'd given him about the implant had been an adequate substitute; as she'd expected, he'd be able to search for the combination of materials that went into the chip in conjunction with the metaphysical essence of a vampire within a certain radius of Los Angeles. Once that unique identifier coalesced on his map, he would then turn every scrap of metal within a one-meter radius of said vampire into lead.

The warlock, Rack, had been quite bemused when she'd asked him if he knew anything about alchemy; he'd laughingly informed her that turning lead into gold would end up costing more in magical supplies than the worth of the gold itself. The smile had dropped out of his tone of voice, replaced by intrigued respect, when she'd told him that gold wasn't her goal at all. While gold was less conductive than copper or silver, lead was even less so; much less so, as a matter of fact. And while it was difficult to precisely target a spell at a distance, a roughly two-meter circle should be a large enough buffer zone to guarantee results. If Spike's chip still worked after Rack's magic was through with him, Lilah would be very surprised.

"Let's see you spin that one to your precious Master Tarfall," Lilah said aloud as the time expired. Not that she expected Gavin to hear her; she had left her apartment after his call an hour ago to search out the nearest sanctuary space in town, a restaurant and bar not too different from the club Angel's pet Pylean had owned before his little Fang Gang had bulldozed their way through it one time too many. The sanctuary spell cast over the interior of this place, however, prevented more than just physical violence; it was calibrated to block most technological and magical methods of eavesdropping, as well. If it might drive away customers, the owner was determined to prevent it, and that had worked in Lilah's favor more than once over the years.

"Considering the fact that he just wasted one of the Firm's major markers against the Initiative, for no return?" an amused voice drawled suddenly in her ear. "Yeah, I'd say he'll have some explaining to do."

Lilah steeled herself not to flinch, then glanced over at the figure seated beside her in the booth. "Sahjhan, how... pleasant to see you again," she said, through clenched teeth. "I assume you're here to pay up on our little agreement?"

"I am a being of my word," he said amiably, favoring her with a scarred, shark-like smile. "You took out the chip; I tell you how to find Connor. Though I don't doubt you'd have figured it out soon enough on your own."

"Of course," she said, returning him smile for smile. If true, that would certainly explain his willingness to give up such valuable information at such a relatively cheap price; she'd half-expected him to wait until Spike's actions could be confirmed, or else to give her another task to perform before he'd talk. But of course, it would do him no good to sit on the information if she was able to uncover it herself. Bastard. Maybe _she_ should have asked for more.

Too late now, of course. "I appreciate your quick response," she continued, coolly. "I hadn't expected you so soon."

Sahjhan laughed. "Believe me, I want to see the boy reduced to his constituent parts as much as you do," he said. "The quicker you take him out, the better _both_ our lives will be."

Lilah took a deep breath, striving to hold on to her patience, and released it through her nose. "That would be easier to arrange if you'd actually give me his name," she prompted him.

"You sure you want me to just blurt it out?" he taunted. "A revelation of this magnitude needs a little lead-up, I think. Why don't you order another glass of wine? C'mon, live a little."

"Oh, I think there's been enough lead-up already," she replied, refusing to give him the satisfaction he was looking for.

"Oh, all right, all right," he sighed, sliding out of the booth. "You ready for this? It starts with a W and ends in ice; add the nickname Destroyer, and that should suffice." He gave her a mocking bow, then disappeared, flitting off elsewhere in the timestream.

Lilah snarled after him, then picked her way through the mangled Robert Frost quote to come up with the only name she _knew_ that fit the bill-- Wesley Wyndam-Price.

"Fuck," she muttered, kicking the base of the table in front of her. "Fuck! All this time, he's been right here in front of me. And then I had to kidnap his girlfriend and turn her over-- Shit! If the Council gets their hands on him, too..."

She fumed. So much for her plans to use Angel's son against him; whatever Holtz had done to ensure that Connor grew up hating the very thought of the leader of the Scourge of Europe, he'd _still_ managed to end up as Angel's right arm. No wonder the vampire had taken him back in after the kidnapping debacle! She'd heard reports from the hospital about Angel's little attempt to suffocate Wes, but the expected lengthy estrangement had never materialized; Wes had been right back in the thick of things with Angel Investigations in no time.

If what Sahjhan had just told her was true-- and she could see no benefit to him to lie about this-- then Angel's son was more than just a prophetic focus and potential weapon; he was also a vital cog in Angel Investigations' recently expanded operations. Forget killing him; whoever _controlled_ him would have leverage over whichever of the Powers' current Champions survived Spike's rampage. And at the rate things were going, that 'whoever' was going to be the Watchers' Council.

I wonder what the Senior Partners would have to say about _that_? she wondered, and smiled grimly as she recalled Gavin's cavalier attitude earlier when they'd discussed her deal with Sahjhan. If she'd just 'let it go' as he'd mockingly advised her to do, then she would still be clueless about the bigger picture. Master Tarfall might forgive him his oversight regarding Spike's chip, but this?

Lilah flipped her cell phone open again and dialed her travel agent's number, hastily booking the next available flight to London. Wolfram & Hart agents there were already involved in the operation to hinder Faith's friends from their attempts to recover her, but when they found out about Connor's new identity... well, priorities might change. She didn't want to lose him to another branch; this was _her_ deal, and _she_ would be the one to benefit from it, which meant she needed to be there, on the ground, when he was dealt with.

Not to mention, if things went wrong? Being far away from Los Angeles when it happened might just save her life. If Mesektet was truly out of the picture, then the perpetuity clause on her contract might have died with the branch of Wolfram & Hart that had hired Lilah-- but Lilah knew better than to bet against the embodiment of darkness. Distance, and more powerful protection, was her best option to save herself.

Hopefully, she wouldn't need that option. But she wouldn't be Lilah Morgan without at least one back-up plan in her pocket.

"England, here I come," she murmured, then dropped enough bills on the table to cover her check and made her way out of the restaurant. If she hurried, she still had time to pack a few necessities before she had to make her flight.

-tbc-


End file.
